The Romance and Thrill. . . or the guilty pleasure of building Warm and Cool Gray! When graphic artist Annabella Silver began to design a magazine, she encountered Warm Gray and Cool Gray color swatches that were beautiful, inspiring, yet intimidating. Thrilled by their subtlety, she began to color gradients, text, and backgrounds with those [...]
Since when does Shakespeare have tips for naming images? While the Bard was many things—author, playwright, poet—as far as we know, he wasn’t a graphic designer. But we think the witches of Macbeth were onto something when they warned of Double Trouble. How so? What happens if you accidentally use two images with the exact [...]
Are These The Same Thing, OR: Who Checks What? Sometimes, when we have a job in-house for printing, questions arise about proofing and preflighting. Are these the same thing? Does the printer “proofread” customer-supplied files? What, exactly, is checked during preflight? Let’s tackle the questions one-by-one. First, proofing and preflighting are NOT the same process. [...]
Pixels and Paths and Problems, Oh My! OR: This hurts my brain. Does it really matter? Has this ever happened to you? You’re asked to create a poster. You’re given a logo. It’s a 2" x 2", 72 dpi jpg. You put it on the poster. You enlarge it to 500%. You get your proof from the [...]
And They All Printed Happily Ever After Once upon a time…there was a Happy nBusiness that lived in a prosperous kingdom. At first the Happy Business only needed a few catalogs once or twice a year. As it grew, the Happy Business needed more and more catalogs. This was great except for the cost of printing more catalogs. What to [...]
What it is and Why You Should Avoid it! OR: What do you mean avoid it? Isn’t it a super-cool, rich-black substitute? Ah, the mysterious registration swatch, designed for manually drawing crop marks. How often do you do that? Seldom? Never? Certainly there are some legitimate uses for this swatch. However, in our corner of the printing [...]
What Difference Does it Make? OR: Why can’t I print the brighter RGB colors? It happened again: you sent your job to the printer, and the preflight report you received says you have some RGB images. What’s the big deal? One color mode is pretty much like the other, right? Wrong. Let’s look briefly at color models. No device [...]
Back Up the Bus on White Copy OR: Hey, what happened to my serifs? If you’re looking for visual impact, let’s be honest: white text reversed out of a colored background can certainly deliver. Like all good printing-related things, it’s most effective when we understand the potential as well as the limitations. First, let’s state the obvious: [...]
Monitor vs. Proof vs. Print - Why Can They All Look Different? OR: Why doesn’t the proof match my screen? You’ve designed your job, you love the color and you send it off to the printer. It sails through preflight and a couple of days later you receive your high quality Epson color proofs. The color isn’t [...]
The Master of Pages is Pulling Your Strings! OR: Is this going to twist my mind or smash my dreams? The answer to that question is obviously no since Master Pages are beautiful things when used correctly. Specifically, we’re going to cover how to set up a master page so that your page numbers and slug lines don’t [...]
