The Anatomy of Gray OR: Why doesn’t my four color gray look…gray? Here’s how the dictionary defines it: gray n 1: a color between white and black; having a neutral hue. The current Pantone color library available in InDesign offers 11 different cool grays and 11 different warm grays. And that doesn’t include all the other versions [...]
What’s Up With the Alphabet Soup? OR: Why can’t I just save everything as a jpg? We are living in an acronym world and I am an acronym…okay, skip that. Let’s just say if you’re working with digital images, you better know your acronyms and your alphabet. TIF, EPS, JPG, GIF, PSD, PDF; the list [...]
No Passport Necessary OR: what’s so important about margins and image area anyway? Hmmm…the magazine you’re designing has gotten a little copy heavy and you’ve already made the text as small as you think you can without affecting readability. But you need to squeeze in a little more text. Here’s an idea: make the margins [...]
Learn these simple marketing tactics to really impact your target market and your bottom line.
Monday morning, 8:00 am Salesperson: “We’re going to put an ad in the local tourism magazine. I want you to build one.” You: “Sounds great! What are the specs for the ad?” Salesperson: “We’re going to go with a half-page advertisement.” You: “Super. Horizontal or vertical and what are the dimensions for that?” Salesperson: “Well…half a page. Probably [...]
The Magic and the Mystery OR: Did you mean crop circles? I thought this was about printing. The truth is that crop circles are crop marks. Okay, not really. Got your attention, though, didn’t it? Now that you’re on the edge of your seat, let’s take an in-depth look at crop marks and their placement. You’re [...]
Fixing that Pesky 4-Color Black Text in Photoshop OR: I hope this is still about printing because I don’t have a tv at work Relax, this has nothing to do with TVs or channel surfing. We’re still talking about printing. Specifically, black text that’s made up of two or more process colors instead of just [...]
What Are They and How Can I Get Some? OR: All my backgrounds go to the edge; isn’t that good enough? It seems like it should be just fine. You’re designing a magazine and you’ve got some cool backgrounds you want to use and you’d like them to bleed. So in your page layout document, which you set [...]
Standard Black vs. Rich Black OR: What do you mean, black that’s blacker than black? Huh? There’s no doubt about it, printing can be confusing. Take black ink for instance. What could be easier or more straightforward? You use the default black color swatch and you’re good to go…right? The answer is a definite maybe. Let’s shed some [...]
Understanding the Difference without Using the Nasty Math OR: My Photos are all 300 dpi; why do some look so bad? In a perfect world, we would always scan our photos or take our photos at 300 dpi and use our photos at 100%. In the real world, though, we’re often forced to scale our [...]
