If you are designing a document in full color that you will be sending to an offset printer for printing, I recommend making main body text 100% or a percentage of black ink only (gray). There are thousands of ink colors to choose from in your design software, but beware if you choose anything other than black ink only for your text.
Why just black ink? Let's get back to the basics and look at the printing process from the start.
Image #1 shows the printing process in its most simple form.
Image #1 shows the printing process in its most simple form.
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| Image #1: 4-Color Printing |
The sheet of paper moves from right to left and runs over each separate press blanket. The first blanket has picked up, from the plate (not pictured here), the correct amount of black ink needed to print the image. The second blanket holds the cyan ink, the third holds the magenta ink and the last blanket holds the yellow ink. The sheet of paper runs over the first blanket, picks the black ink up off of the blanket, then passes over the second, third and fourth blankets. Each time the sheet of paper passes each separate ink module on the press, the sheet stretches by a tiny amount. When the sheet of paper stretches is it difficult to make each color ink lay down on the sheet of paper in the exact same spot. "In-registration" means that the 4 separate ink colors are laid down on the sheet in exactly the same place. When it is "out of registration" the ink colors are not laid down on the sheet in exactly the same place making the image or type appear fuzzy. The sheet of paper stretches by a tiny amount, but that tiny amount can show up like a spotlight on a poorly designed publication.
Image #1 above shows an image being printed that was designed as 100% Black, 100% Cyan, 100% Magenta and 100% Yellow ink laid on top of each other – super, super black. This is a pressman’s worst nightmare. It is too much ink for the paper to hold and will subsequently smear easily and take a very long time to dry. It also makes it very difficult to keep each color in registration with the other 3 colors since the sheet stretches more with more ink coverage on the page. When printing a long run on the press it is difficult to hold the registration throughout the entire job. If you design the job using 4-color type, the difficulty in keeping registration may result in handfuls of your job coming off the press with lower quality than you expect. The Image #2 is the same Image but with a design using 100% black ink only.
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| Image #2: 100% Black Ink Printing |
If you look on the K (black) Blanket there is an image. There is no image on the other 3 ink blankets since the image was created using only 100% black. This type of printing makes it easy for the pressman to get it right on every sheet since registration does not need to be as exact. This is especially true with full color publications. I recommend making room in your design for the main body text to be black ink only. This will create a publication that will print as you intended it to.
