The Essence of Time

Having worked in very time restrictive mediums (live television and pre-press design) My first years were spent wasting a lot of my time on elements of design that I thought were well worth the extra time but turned out not to pay off in the end.  Over the years I have learned to eliminate wasted time by following a few simple design recommendations.

1. Do not throw any designs away.  In the beginning of my career I felt like nothing I designed looked good and sometimes I would scrap a design completely.  On one of my very first important design jobs, I had run out of time. I had nothing to show my customer but the designs that I all but threw out the window.  I was sweating before that meeting thinking I was going to hear the worst comments about the garbage I thought I was giving them. However, to my instant surprise my customer loved them all and picked one to move forward with.  They've been a very loyal customer ever since.  That was when I started to keep all of my designs and realized that I wasn't designing for my likes and dislikes, but what my customer likes.  I may not know what they like right away so a design that I despise, might be the one that they love.  Not throwing any designs away keeps me from having to start over, lessening the time spent on the concept creation process.  This keeps my customers happy about the time and the cost of the project. 

2.  Never push a customer into a design that you want them to pick.  This will cost you precious time if they decide in the future that the design was not what they were looking for.  You will probably lose the customer if you push them into something they aren't crazy about.  Most customers want to be part of the design process and if you flat out tell them that their ideas won't work and only your idea will, it will keep them from keeping you.  Make them part of the process.  Listen to your customer and even if they say they want something that won't work in the format you are designing for, find a comparable design that will work in the medium requested. You will lose time and money if you try to bully your customers into liking something they don't.

3. Find your own style.  I used to find inspiration from anywhere and everywhere, but mimicking the design style of someone else can take up time that you can not afford.  There are set effects and tricks that I use on just about every one of my designs.  This is mostly for rush jobs that have a tight deadline. The main design element is original but there are some simple effects that I use on almost everything else.  I guess you could call it my own style. Once I figured out the simple elements that make my designs work every time, my time spent on projects has dramatically shifted, allowing me to concentrate on really making the main design element unique. I try to change these set elements  on the jobs that I have more time to work with. This opens new opportunity for my own set style to change. Give this one some time though.  It takes a thorough understanding of your design programs and it takes trial and error to find the right base design elements for you. 

4. Initial design concepts do not have to be perfect.  I spent years figuring out that the initial design concept does not have the be the finished product.  You can save yourself a lot of time when proposing a design concept to a customer if you don't completely finish the design.  I am not telling you to hand them something that is stick figures, but the little touches that need to be added, can be added later.  Explain ahead of time to your customer that the initial design is intended to get an idea of what direction they want to go in, and that once they decide the direction, the finishing touches and real eye popping elements will knock them over when they see the final product.  This also keeps you from wasting too much time on the finishing touches on a design that they may not chose.  This trick may not work for everyone, you have to be able to convince the customer that the best is yet to come.  You have to sell your designs. If you are not eloquent and don't have the confidence to talk them through to the next step, then you will have to take the extra time with a work that will speak for itself. 

I consider myself an extremely quick and efficient designer.  I have never missed a deadline, and  never will miss a deadline.  Turn around time might be only one element to keeping a customer happy in this competitive world of graphic design, but I find that if you can create effective designs more quickly than the guy next to you, you will win over the customer every time.

The Trouble with Color Matching

What is a Pantone Color?  Pantone colors seem like a miracle for designers when they first start designing for print.  It is a color selection system that should print exactly the color that they see in their swatch books. Designing everything using Pantone inks may not be the best idea. What most designers have never been told is that the Pantone Color matching system is great if your customer wants to pay for the specific Pantone inks to be ordered from Pantone and used in the press in place of the traditional Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and black inks that make up standard full color press printing.  Once you design something that contains more than 2 pantone inks, the price is considerably higher than standard 4-color printing (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black ink) due to the cost of ordering the specific Pantone Inks.  The combination of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black inks can create just about any color that you are looking for… with some major exceptions.  The problems arise when designers go overboard picking multiple pantone colors for their designs.  For example I recently had a customer send us a postcard from a design agency in which the agency had chosen 5 different Pantone or PMS colors as the “brand” colors.  This seems like the right thing to do to ensure the color will not vary from one printed piece to another, but one of those colors was Pantone Orange 21.  If you view Pantone Orange 21 on your monitor and in a Pantone Swatch book it is a very bright orange.  It was what seemed to be a very nice color choice. However since we had priced the postcard as our standard full color printing, CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black ink) printing, we had to convert the PMS Orange 021 in the design into the following color breakdown: 0% Cyan ink, 68% Magenta ink, 100% yellow ink, and 0% Black ink.  This color breakdown, which is the recommended color breakdown by Pantone, creates a much different orange color. Why? Since Pantone creates the Pantone Orange 021 ink using unique pigments that are completely different from Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, the final color is a color that can not be achieved using mixes of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black ink.  The best we can do is to attempt to get it as close as possible.  Here is an image with Pantone 021 ink next to the suggested CMYK combination to show you the difference.

What you are viewing is not a correct and absolute representation of the inks since you are viewing these colors on a monitor that combines Red, Green and Blue to create the colors you see.

Although the difference may not seem like much to you on your monitor, the difference can mean a lot to your customer.

The best way to avoid running into this color matching problem is to purchase a Pantone Color Bridge, which shows the Pantone inks side by side with the recommended CMYK mix.  Once you view the differences it will change how you chose the colors for your next project.

4-color Type: Use it Wisely.

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: 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. 

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.

The Age Old Battle - RGB vs. CMYK

Many of my customers that are not in the immediate area, request a .pdf file proof of their publication to speed up the turn around time on any particular job.  Pre-press departments are usually wary of sending .pdf file proofs to customers.  Why?  We have a lot of reasons, but color matching is the first reason that comes to mind.  

When a customer receives a .pdf file proof they almost always assume that their monitor is showing the colors that will print.  This is a completely false assumption.  How do I know it is a false assumption?  Well for one thing, open a .pdf file on your computer then print it out on your home or office printer.  Does the color that printed, exactly match what you are viewing on your monitor? Most likely the color is not the same.  Sometimes it will be fairly close, and sometimes it will be completely different.  Most people don’t notice the discrepancy between the colors on a monitor and the colors that are printed since the color on most of the items we print on our home or office printers isn’t the most important part of the document.  Color is often overlooked.  In press printing, color is one of the most important parts of a finished printed piece.  In my opinion color is the single most stressful part of press printing.  I have often hated the color “royal blue” for the simple fact that to me it is the most difficult color to achieve in CMYK press printing from a pre-press standpoint.  To illustrate this, below is a color spectrum for RGB and CMYK side by side.  RGB is the color spectrum that your monitor builds all the colors we see. 

It mixes Red, Green, and Blue light to create pink, yellow, cyan and every color in between. Black is achieved by using no light at all, and white is achieved by mixing 100% of all of the colors together. CMYK printing is completely different. In CMYK printing all colors are achieved using a mix of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black inks. Because most printing is on white paper, we don’t need an ink to achieve white, we simply print no ink on the areas that we intend to be white. Black can achieved using just the black ink or by a mix of all of the inks together. Now that you understand how colors are achieved in RGB vs CMYK, lets move onto the important things: The reason I hate royal blue. Royal blue can easily be achieved on a monitor which means most people see the pretty blue on their monitor and think it will exactly translate to a printer, however royal blue is not easily achieved in CMYK printing. If you look at the diagram for RGB printing, you will see one of the three main colors, Blue. This Blue is pretty close to a royal blue by my ideals of what royal blue is. In CMYK printing there is no “blue” ink, there is only Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black inks. This means that the royal blue you see on the RGB scale converts to a mix of cyan and magenta on the CMYK scale. This creates a color closer to indigo, which to most people appears purple. So when people choose the standard bright glowing blue that Microsoft Word, Publisher, MAC Pages and other programs offer right off the bat, they expect it to print the color they see, which will never happen! I have had so many issues with the color blue, that now when I see a Word, Publisher, or Mac Pages file where someone has chosen that bright blue, instead of keeping the color as the standard conversion, I usually change it to the following CMYK breakdown to achieve what I have found to be the least complained about mix of inks as close to royal blue as I can get it. Royal Blue: C=100% M=58% Y=0% B=25%. This color appears closer to a “teal” color on your monitor, but when printed on a press if you sweet-talk your pressman, they can usually get it pretty close to royal blue. I could talk for hours about the issues caused by Microsoft Word, Publisher, and Mac Pages, but let’s save that for another time!

What’s the problem with Publisher?

In the past two years since the recession has hit small businesses hard, I have seen an influx of files created in programs like Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Word and even MAC Pages.  Companies are trying to save  money they spent in the past on a graphic designer by having their staff create publications in the programs readily available at a low price.  There are many offset press printing companies that will not accept Publisher files for printing.  So what is the problem with Publisher?  In short, these programs were designed for home or digital printing.   There are 4 major issues with sending these files to an offset printer.

1.     Color: When you choose a color in Microsoft word or Publisher like Blue or Red they are a glowing representation of those two colors.  What you don’t realize is the blue that you have selected converts to a much darker blue (almost purple) in CMYK printing (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black inks mixed to create color on a printing press).  The red you have selected prints almost orange on a printing press.  Just about every color that you will choose in any of those programs (unless you know how to choose a CMYK color properly) will not print as you intend it to.  Call your offset printer if you want to find out about how to choose the proper CMYK color using the program you have.

2.     Fonts: Fonts are an issue no matter what program you create a file in, but since Word, and MAC Pages have no option for collecting the fonts used in the publication we will not guarantee that the fonts will print as you see them on your computer.  If we do not have the font you chose installed on our computer when opening the document, the Word and Mac pages programs automatically substitute a font without warning us.  This can make your final piece look like hieroglyphics!  We try our best to find the fonts you used, but it is always best when using programs outside of the professional design software to choose fonts that are common to most computers such as Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman, Garamond, etc.

3.     Images: When using publisher you have the option to link or embed images in your document.  Most people don’t know how to change these options.  What’s the Difference?  Linking means that the images are saved in a folder separate from the publisher file and the publisher file contains a link where the image is supposed to be.  It is almost like a link to an image on a web page.  This keeps the size of the publisher file down.  If you link the images you have to package the file properly for your printers otherwise your images will not print well.  If we receive a publisher file with linked images, but they don’t send us the actually images in a different file, publisher automatically changes those images to be an embedded low-resolution image.  An embedded image is exactly what it sounds like.  The image is literally embedded into the publisher file at the resolution you set it to.  This means that the publisher file can become extra large making it cumbersome to work with.

4.     Bleed:  Most home publishing software does not provide an easy way to include a bleed on a document. Don’t know what a bleed is?  Click here to read my previous instructions on what a bleed is and for basic instructions on how to include a bleed in these programs.

I don’t hold anything against companies that use these programs to create publications. In fact I welcome newcomers to the graphic design profession. My advice is to learn to use the programs correctly. Figure out how to include a proper bleed, learn what colors to choose, use common fonts and learn the difference between embedding images and linking to the images. A way to avoid having the issues I have listed above is to send a print ready .pdf file to your printer. What do I mean when I say “print ready .pdf”? Look for my next edition of Pre-Press Tips and Tricks next month and I will hopefully be able to walk you through creating a print ready .pdf file. Good luck and be Sheetwise!

Image Resolution and Press Printing

The first lesson I learned as a budding pre-press technician was that you can not pull images from the web and have them print as well as they look on screen. The reason is that the optimum resolution for posting images on a screen is much lower than the optimum resolution for print images. Below is a definition of Resolution posted on About.com by Sue Chastain:

Resolution is a measurement of the output quality of an image, usually in terms of samples, pixels, dots, or lines per inch. The terminology varies according to the intended output device. PPI (pixels per inch) refers to screen resolution, DPI (dots per inch) refers to print resolution, SPI (samples per inch) refers to scanning resolution, and LPI (lines per inch) refers to halftone resolution.

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/glossary/g/resolution.htm

The reason you cannot use web images on a printed piece is that the optimum resolution for web images is 72dpi and the optimum resolution for print is 300dpi. The lower the resolution the worse the images look in print.

Ok now that you know that 300dpi is essential to print your images well on a press, how can we figure out the dpi for an image? Well most designers have access to photo editing software that will tell them exactly what the DPI is. If you don’t have software to figure this out, there are a couple of simple math equations that can help you out with this.

Pixels/Inches= DPI

Basically if you know how many pixels wide and tall your images is, as well as the measurement in inches you can figure out the DPI.


Below is an example

To find out the image DPI just take the pixel width : 1500 and divide it by the Inch width: 5.


1500
   5    = 300


The result is 300, which is your width DPI. The width and height DPI is always the same so if you make the calculation for only one dimension you don’t have to make the calculation for the other dimension.

You can use the same formula if you know the pixel size and the DPI, to figure out what size in inches the image actually is. Just switch the equation around as below:

Pixels/DPI= Inches

This is a handy tool when you are trying to print the image to a printer.

How does all of this really effect printing? The more pixels you have in the width as compared to the width in inches the higher the resolution. For example if you have an image with 1500 pixels in the width but the inch width is 15, then if you divide 1500 (pixel width) by 15 (inch width) the result is 100 DPI which is too low for printing.

Can you resize an image to have a higher DPI? Yes and No. You can only re-size an image to have a lower DPI which is why you can not use images from the web in a print design. However some software does allow you to increase the DPI (I really wish they would eliminate that option in the software!), but if you start with a low resolution to begin with, the fuzziness of the original photo never goes away. See the image below to find out why. I have zoomed in on a portion of the image to show you what the image looks like at print resolution and how it will print:

A simple way of thinking about this is using cameras. Everyone has probably tried to purchase a digital camera in the past few years and has heard the term megapixels per inch. The higher you go in megapixels per inch with a digital camera the clearer the image is. The same goes for DPI and images for printing. The higher the DPI the clearer the image will print.

The Bolder the Better

I can remember the moment I realized that there was no such thing as white ink in offset printing. It was a flash of embarrassment as I learned the truth. Such a simple idea, so obvious and yet the concept never crossed my mind. How embarrassing to have a printer explaining the concept to me as a young graphic designer. I don’t know why it never occurred to me that all white type was actually a color printed with the type “knocked out” or blank to show the white paper through the colored ink. Knocked out type can be an effective design element but can also go very wrong if you don’t follow a few rules.

Rule #1: Try not to use knock out type when the color or image you are knocking the type out of is built from 2 or more ink colors. It seems ridiculous that you can use knock out type in some instances but not in others but I hope the image and explanation below will show you why:

Image #1                          Image #2                          Image #3

In Image 1 type is knocked out of a single ink color: 100% black ink. This design is very easy for a press operator to keep looking crisp and professional since it shows up on only 1 plate. Offset printing combines 4 different colors to create the color spectrum you view on full color printed pieces.

Image 2 shows type knocked out of 2 colors: 100% Yellow and 100% Cyan ink. Image 3 is zoomed in on one piece of image 2 and shows what the final printed piece might look like. The fuzziness of the type is due to the press the piece was printed on being “out of registration”. Out of registration means the Cyan Plate is not positioned in the exact same spot as the Yellow plate on the press before printing the pieces. In press printing the plates are hung on a press and separated by sometimes over 12”. The sheet of paper runs over the first plate and picks up the proper amount of cyan ink that the cyan plate is holding, then runs over the second plate and picks up the proper amount of yellow ink that the yellow plate is holding. If either plate is off by millimeters, image 3 is the result. It makes the white type look fuzzy with a yellow and blue shadow. This will not happen with every printer you send your printing to, but if you design with Rule #1 in mind, your pieces will print crisp and clean every time no matter what kind of press your printer is working with.

Rule #2: You should never knock out type that is smaller than 8pt because it becomes very difficult to read. Paper is a naturally absorbent and fibrous material. Knocked out type at 8pt or under in size tends to fill in when printed due to ink spreading and filling the gaps between fibers in the paper. If you choose an un-coated stock (which is very popular in print graphic design these days) the ink will spread more on the sheet due to the extra absorbent nature of the paper than if you choose a coated stock which is treat with an extra coating to help minimize ink spreading.

Rule #3: The Bolder the Better. You can see this in Image 1. The thinner the font chosen, the more difficult it is to read. Even though you might be able to read the font just fine on screen that doesn’t mean that it will print as clear as you see it. This rule comes back to the ink spreading issue discussed in Rule #2. Even if you picked a font larger than 8pt, if it is too thin, it too will fill in due to ink spread.

Keeping these tips in mind when designing for print will keep your finished product looking crisp, consistent and professional.