Design - Handy Hints
We want your work to be printed successfully and to be of a high quality. With a computer in every home and office (nearly), many people want to do their own design, either because they want to be able to control the design process or to save money.However many people, including graphic designers, are not aware of some of the pitfalls in creating work for printing on a press. This can lead to frustration and disappointment. These notes may help to ensure a better result by sharing our experience in designing for print.
Q: Color
A: A computer screen creates color by means of Red Green and Blue dots (RGB). A printing press uses reflected light, not emitted light, so uses Cyan, magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK). Using RGB when designing a piece or artwork for printing results in a color shift. To avoid this, most graphic design programs can be set to work in CMYK rather then RGB.
There are two main types of printing on a press, spot color and full color. Spot color is suitable when only one or two colros are used in your work. It has the advantage of ensuring that the colors produced are accurate and the work is often less expensive to print. Full color on the other hand, gives a designer much more flexibility. Recent trends have dramatically cut the cost of full color printing by printing several jobs at once. However precise color reproduction (because each shade is made up of dots of CMYK) is not possible. Please note, printing ink is transparent. If printed on a cream or other color paper or card, a color shift may occur.
A: Graphics are created in two main ways, by a series of dots across the screen or page, or by mathematically defined lines. The first type is called raster or bitmap and the second type vector graphics. Vectors are great! They can be scaled from very small to very large with no loss of information, but they can be tricky to create. They are typically used for clipart or logos. Raster graphics by contrast (think Photoshop and many other photo editing programs) are easier to work with. It's what you get from a digital camera for example.
When sending a graphic for printing, we like to have as high a resolution as possible. A graphic or a website is very low resolution to make the page load quickly, usually 72 dots per inch (dpi). If printed, such a graphic would look awful, and if enlarged to fill a space in a brochure perhaps, it will look even worse. We need to work with images that are at least 300dpi for the size we are printing, and preferably 600dpi.
A: A bleed is the quaint name given by printers and designers to the part of the image that extends beyond the finished edge of the page. If an image has to go to the edge of the page we print on a larger sheet of paper, extend the image by at least 1/8" and then cut to the trim line. This gives color right to the edge of the final piece. If we try and cut along a printed line, some sheets will have thin white edges which will look terrible. Cutting technology is simply not perfect, so when cutting hundreds of sheets on a paper cutter, the bleed gives us the confidence to know that each sheet will look great.
A: Crops are the guidelines or trim lines (see Bleeds above) that we print outside the finished piece to tell the person cutting the paper to size where to position the cutter. If there is no bleed and nothing too close to the edge, then we can print on the finished paper size. If not then an 8.5" x 11" letter sized item would be often be printed four at a time on a 17.5" x 22.5" sheet, or two at a time on an 8.75" x 11.25" sheet. This allows us to reduce the time on the press, saving you money, but means that a final trim is needed to the correct size.
A: Related to the above two topics is where the images and text are placed on a design. Apart from the positioning to give a good appearance, there is the importance of positioning to help make a job easier to print. For example, if when designing a business card text is placed closer than 1/8" from the edge of the finished card, it is quite likely that some of the words will be sliced into when the cards are cut to size. When a paper cutter blade comes down it drags at the stack of paper slightly, so the bottom sheets can be very slightly longer than the top. Frequent sharpening of blades, smaller pile heights and care when setting up can reduce the effect, but not eliminate it. So keep important information, especially text, at least 1/8" away from the edge.
Another factor is cost. If a letterhead is printed on an 8.5" x 11" sheet, or two up on an 11" x 17" sheet, there is a cost saving versus buying paper that is slightly larger and then having the additional cost of cutting to final size. However a press uses clamps to grab a piece of paper from the pile and carry it through the press for printing. We need to leave 1/3" at the leading edge for the clamp so nothing can be printed in this area.
A: There are many, many fonts of different designs. We have over 5,000 on our computers to cope with most requirements. They also come in different types, such as Truetype, Open Type and Type 1, though Windows has meant that Truetype fonts are predominating. It helps us greatly when a customer sends us a hard-copy of what they require, if we know the font names to be used. Otherwise it can take hours hunting for a good match. If sending an electronic file, a pdf avoids a lot of the problems as it contains the fonts used in the document. However problems can still occur. To be absolutely sure, and if no further editing is needed, most design programs allow the fonts to be converted (or outlined) into vector lines. If doing this, make doubly sure that any special fonts, bullets etc. have not disappeared. It has happened.