As with any printing or manufacturing company, mistakes can be made. On average, the e-commerce printing companies accept a 12% rejection rate so, you have a 12% chance of a mistake in your printing order. Small businesses like us, DaVinci Graphics, take our customers and their jobs and make sure they are done to the customers satisfaction. We make sure it is done right the first time. While no one is perfect, I have a hard time remembering any final product that the customer has not been satisfied with. If it was the case, we take care of it by reprinting at little to no cost or compromising on what needs to be done. In a tight market, made worse by the recession, its very hard to recover from projects that need to be rerun. In an economy where one is trying to manage costs, a redo of a project can be devastating. There is just no margin for error. Let's say your net profit margin is 5%, after costs. If a job s done wrong and let's say it "costs," $200.00 to redo it. To recoup the $200.00 in profit, you must do $4000.00 in sales. For a small business, it's very hard to absorb this kind of blow.

The main point is "communicate, communicate, communicate." This is how the small businessman can stay one step ahead of the economy. Talk to your customers. Advise them on how to save money while still delivering the piece they want. Lastly, send proofs for everything. Content, color, binding, paper stock, anything that pertains to the project being created. Remember the customer is key. Keep them pleased and clearly demonstrate the value you can add to the job and you will have them forever.

Take our poll and we will post the results in a future article along with solutions to the problem. No personal information will be included. Thanks for your participation.

We sprung for t-shirts and they turned out awesome. Four different colors, blue, light blue, sea foam green, and white. We thank Spikes Trophies for them.

Web Typography

Web typography has been beaten to a pulp in discussion, techniques, blogs, magazines, the world over, so it is no ground breaking subject. Web design and web sites can be works of art and it’s a shame to see the same six or seven fonts used over and over again. Granted, fonts like Helvetica and Times New Roman are standard for a reason, they are beautiful, but branding and design is choked back by this limitation and design concepts aren’t able to flourish into the would-be-beauty’s that they potentially could be. But, there are ground breaking things going on in the industry that make web typography a hot topic for the future.

@font-face seems to be all the new rage, with sites like Typekit pioneering the art of font replacement in css styles. Yet, there are still a few kinks that need to be worked out with this technique. Number one, standard fonts, that are used just as often as Times New Roman and Helvetica, like Garamond and Univers, can not be embedded into the @font-face replacement. I am not quite sure the reasons behind this, probably licensing and legal issues, but until I can use Trade Gothic Condensed Bold No. Twenty for my h2 tags, @font-face fails to satisfy my typographic hunger in web design. A

Another reason I hesitate to incorporate @font-face into my designs is that it uses JavaScript to embed the fonts. This is no different from any other font replacement technique on the web right now. The drawback to using JavaScript for typography is that some people don’t enable JavaScript on their browsers. It pains me to use this as a reason but, until JavaScript becomes a household name, @font-face and Cufon cease to solve the problem.

Cufon is another clever, “almost there”, font-replacement technique that is on the brink of being what I am looking for. It also uses JavaScript but in a different way. It uses selectors to replace that text with rendered images of the embedded font. Unlike @font-face, Cufon allows any TrueType font to be used to replace text. Downsides? Yes, it’s not all peachy. The image replacement technique has a few quirks that are hard to work around. Line-height becomes and issue when using Cufon. Some fonts don’t allow for the adjustment of line-height in the CSS styles, and when you are using Cufon to make the typography on your site impeccable, it’s impossible when the line-height doesn’t respond to your styling. Another drawback is link rollovers don’t respond to Cufon targeted selectors. This doesn’t bode well for a sweet navigation menu using Swiss 71a with a hover effect and the hover effect doesn’t appear.

There are more image replacement scripts out there and tons of free @font-face fonts out there to use but they all have their similar degrees of issues. An idea for the future is to maybe have an online foundry of fonts that designers can draw from and when a user visits their site, it activates that font. Sounds similar to Typekit right? Well, maybe use php instead of JavaScript to send the activation back and forth. Or, browsers allow designers to include a font in their directory and that font becomes activated on a visitors computer when visiting a particular site. Both of the suggestions for the future are vague and not researched but until JavaScript is eliminated, and new web safe fonts become available, web typography will be a battle for every designers in the future.

Social Media

Another aspect of web design that has been revolutionized in the past decade is social media. Everyone is online and on Facebook and/or Twitter. They have become an integral part of social and professional communication. Every respectable business tweets and has a facebook fan page, and don’t forget about a domain name. So why so many different places for relatively the same thing? It’s a good question. The future holds an exciting possibility that Smashing Magazine recently wrote an article about. Holistic Web Browsing is a unique idea that holds a lot of weight.

As far as one person having a hundred different places to find information about them, what if one site was like a personal url where all of that information could be pulled in by an API or similar source. Instead of going to facebook, LinkedIN, Flickr, Twitter, Last.FM… you get the point, you got to www.facebook.com/uniqueid and boom, there it is. Everything you used to have to look for across plethora’s of social sites is now in one convenient location. This is not to say facebook and twitter become insignificant in the future, well maybe a little, but like any revolutionary web based application, it always takes a little while to catch on and never completely eliminates the competition. People would still be able to access their info on other sites and not even use them if they wanted, this site would be a sort of yellow pages for the internet.

Holistic Web Browsing

Keeping with the Holistic Web Browsing idea in mind, what if web browsers became the operating system for your computer. The web is becoming faster and more powerful everyday. You can run apps from it and access it from a cell phone on a subway in Timbuktu. So what if it became the source of everything you do on your computer, and instead of having a tab open for each different window, your desktop background would just be the Google homepage. I think that would be a good look. Regardless, instead of having a bookmark bar and a thousand tabs open on your browser, url’s would run as applications from your desktop just as your Mac Mail does when you click on it. It would be the same size but now, going back to that yellow pages of the internet idea, you could find every email address you ever wanted to find would be right in your contacts. Every Photoshop action or illustrator brush you used to download from the web would now be already installed.

Yes, it’s a delusion of grandeur and seems a little impossible but, hey, it’s the future.

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• 1. In 2003-04 digital color outsold film cameras.
• 2. 2006-07, more color prints were being made at retail stores than at home on a color printer.
• 3. 2008-09, Polaroid Cameras were discontinued and Kodak no longer made Kadachrome film (Sorry Paul Simon).

As a matter of fact, there are over 10 billion color photos on Facebook alone. People not only want color on their site, but also want color photo albums* of their families and friends. With the new digital technology this is easily accomplished. Yes, entire photo albums with personalized color covers are on the uprise. What does this mean? People(consumers) want color in everything they do and they want to reproduce it in calendars, photo albums, and framed photos. Still, color applications go far beyond this.

With the new XMPie software, printers can now send out direct mail pieces which are addressed and personalized to the person who’s attention you are trying to capture. With an InDesign plug-in, digital printers can not only place the address and the name of the person it is aimed towards, but it can also swap graphics for each mail piece depending on the addressees profile.

This one-to-one in one marketing is a powerful tool and is outgrowing all other sources of advertising. Confused? Well let’s say you want to get your company’s info in front of the head of marketing at ABC Hospital. A direct mail piece is sent out to this this person with the individuals name and profile specific graphics tailored to that person. An incentive is introduced to have this person log onto your website where you begin to glean information on your prospective customer, from the “matrix” of data collected. When the prospective customer logged in, how deep did they go? What items or articles did they click on and read? Now you have real useful data. The response rate to these direct mail pieces (personalized print jobs) is 5x to 10x higher than a generic mail piece and about the same price. Now you’ve established a direct line of communication with the potential customer. You have added value to your print project by making it a dynamic marketing material that you can track and glean information from.

Overall, direct mail marketing and one-to-one in one marketing is a valuable tool for businesses who want to target specific markets where their product or service is most useful.

For more information on one-to-one in marketing: to increase sales and your bottom line, contact us at Davinci Graphics.

Often times printers, like ourselves, can assume that everyone knows that printing business language. We take for granted that we can talk this way amongst ourselves and expect a fellow printer to understand us. For the average joe, some of these terms may be foreign. Therefore, this post will act as a constantly updated, compiled list of terms that we printer’s use from time to time in daily discussion.

Bleed

Printing. (of printed matter) to run off the edges of a page, either by design or through mutilation caused by too close trimming.

Dots

Printing. an individual element in a halftone reproduction.

Gutter

the white space formed by the inner margins of two facing pages in a bound book, magazine, or newspaper.

Imposition

The arrangement of page plates in proper order on a press for printing a signature.

Margin

The space around the printed or written matter on a page.

Offset

A process in which a lithographic stone or metal or paper plate is used to make an inked impression on a rubber blanket that transfers it to the paper being printed, instead of being made directly on the paper.

Pantone

A set of standard colors for printing, each of which is specified by a single number. You can buy a Pantone swatch book containing samples of each color. Some computer graphics software allows colors to be specified as Pantone numbers. Even though a computer monitor can only show an approximation to some of the colors, the software can output a color separation for each different Pantone color, enabling a print shop to exactly reproduce the original desired color.

Press Check

As soon as the ink is up to run-specifications, the pressman will pull a sheet for you to look at, approve and probably sign off on.

Process

is a subtractive color model, used in color printing, also used to describe the printing process itself. CMYK refers to the four inks used in most color printing: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key black

Proof

a. a trial impression, as of composed type, taken to correct errors and make alterations.
b. one of a number of early and superior impressions taken before the printing of the ordinary issue: to pull a proof.

Spot Color

is a specially mixed ink using in printing. Spot color inks come in a rainbow of colors, including some specialty inks such as metallic and fluorescent.

Spread

Two facing pages, as of a newspaper, magazine, or book.

Varnish

A preparation consisting of resinous matter, as copal or lac, dissolved in an oil (oil varnish)  or in alcohol (spirit varnish) or other volatile liquid. When applied to the surface of wood, metal, etc., it dries and leaves a hard, more or less glossy, usually transparent coating.

The printing business has always been misunderstood and fickle. For someone who is not constantly working with pressman and pre-press departments, file set-up can seem easy, but be a confusing and contradictory process. Whether someone is a designer or a client trying to save a few bucks by taking the respectable do-it-yourself way, designing a file for print is one of, if not the most important part of getting a project to look it’s absolute best.

There are many different factors to determine how a project should be set up. In this tutorial, we will be going through the steps like we were designing a one color business card front and back, with three different names and a common back. It’s one of the most common jobs we get with the highest error rate (that’s not a scientific fact I just see it all the time).

Here’s what we will be designing…

We will be working in Adobe InDesign CS3 because that’s what I have. There are other programs out there that can be used to make business cards but there are only two I would recommend, and this is the first tip of the article. Always design your projects in either InDesign or QuarkXpress. Word, PowerPoint, Publisher, Mac Pages, etc. are terrible for print purposes. They don’t give you the options necessary to develop what a printer needs to produce your design. Secondly, a rule of thumb is create all type and 1-3 color artwork in either InDesign or Illustrator. Vector images use mathematical equations to create the image and always print at the crispest quality because they can be reduced and enlarged and keep the same resolution. All photos and 4 color artwork can be produced in Photoshop. The reason you wouldn’t use Photoshop for text or logo is because it uses pixels to create it’s artwork and when reduced or enlarged, the quality of the picture changes. Now these aren’t rules that can’t be broken but for the sake of printers everywhere, don’t break them.

1. Create the Document

Ok so let’s get started. Open InDesign and go to File > New > Document. A Dialog box opens and asks you for the parameters of your project. Ignore the Document Preset box and go to the dimensions of the project. For this business card we want the width to be 2 Inches x 3.5 Inches, standard vertical business card size. Make sure the columns are set to 1, but this should be what it is as a default. Set all the margins to .325 Inches. In printing, space between the edges of the document and the artwork is crucial for consistency. In bindery we have to cut large quantity’s of print projects and it’s not an exact science. In order to avoid cutting off important artwork or type, the standard margin between the edge of the document and the should be .25″, in-less there is bleed which, in this project there is. So set the bleed to .125 Inches. Bleed is important in printing projects where color is touching the edges because again, bindery is not an exact science and there needs to be some margin of error taken into account. Bleed allows the bindery operator to miss the cut crops by a minuscule amount and not get a white border.

So, we’re ready to start designing our project. I have my cards set-up and will explain what I did to make them print ready. Turn on the guides (Apple+; on a mach Cntrl+; on a PC). Notice that all of the artwork is inside the magenta borders which are the margins we set. Secondly, any color that touches the edges goes to the red line outside of the document bounds, which are in black. On EVERY print project this is how it should be. Color touching the edges = bleeds. All artwork that doesn’t touch the edges goes INSIDE .25″ margins.

2. Colors

Now the colors. In this project the logo and all the other blues are some percentage of Pantone 3155 U. This makes the project a one color project because we only use one PMS color. This may seem odd to someone without print knowledge but it’s important in the offset printing world because the number of colors can either cost or save you money. Granted some projects dictate full color CMYK runs, that’s fine, but a lot of corporate identity and business cards have standard colors they use and it saves them money to pick a PMS ink and run it in one – three colors and still achieve the colors they want. In order to pick the color that you want, you need a Pantone Color Book. They are expensive and for most, probably unimportant to have. If you have a good printer they will have a PMS book for you to choose a color from, or a great printer, you could just trust their expertise. Anyways once you know the PMS you want you need to make every instance of that color in you document that PMS. In order to select a PMS color in InDesign go to the Swatches Palette and click on the two downward pointing arrows in the top right corner. A drop down list should appear with options. Choose the first option called “New Color Swatch”. A dialog box appears and asks you to name the new swatch, don’t worry about that because a PMS color will name itself. Go to the Color Type and choose spot. Then go to color mode and scroll through the options to find Pantone Solid Uncoated. A whole gamut of PMS colors will appear with a search field at the top. At this point you would type in the PMS # you wanted (in our case 3155) and hit ok. Now the color will be added to the swatches palette and can be applied to all the colors in the document.

3. Making the PDF

Ok, so we have the colors applied, the margins and bleeds set up, the names of the people getting cards, and we are ready to make the PDF. First, always save your project at this point. Then go to File > Export or Apple+E on Mac and Control+E on PC. Name the project and go down to the bottom of the dialog box and select PDF from the Format Drop Down Box. Hit Save and the PDF options box will appear. The General options should appear. Probably, for this project, the only important options in the general tab is the page range. Just make sure that All is selected.

Next, click the Compression tab. These settings are a little more advanced and for this project are insignificant. They are meant to downsize large images to make file sizes smaller. we don’t have any huge graphics or lots of information so just choose no compression for all and make the settings as same as mine.

Then click on Marks and Bleeds. This is the most important step and probably the easiest. Lots of designer’s take this step a little to far for what a printer actually needs. The crops and bleeds, which we talked about earlier, are output through these settings. If there are no bleeds you don’t need bleeds or crop marks applied. Yet, for any designer sending files to a printer, it never hurts to apply crops and bleeds to every project. Just because more is always better than less. Printers have the ability to remove bleeds and crops with pre-press software. So in this box apply only crop marks to file and go to the bottom and set the bleeds to Use Document Settings. Printers don’t need all that other jazz that InDesign includes like bleed marks and color bars. That stuff is frivolous and is included for aspiring printers and such. Like I said, a good printer will have pre-press software specifically adapted to the machinery in the shop that adds the extras based on presets and custom parameters. The other four tabs Output, Advanced, Security and Summary are unimportant most of the times and can be found out about on Adobe’s site.

4. Reviewing the PDF

So, hit export and wait for the PDF to be created. We are almost done but now we have to just check a few things in Acrobat. Open the PDF and just check the sizes. It’s going to be a little bigger than 2 x 3.5 (our original document size) because of the crops. Just make sure all colors that touch the edges are bleeding, the crops are there, and there is sufficient white space between the edges and the artwork. Now, go to Advanced > Print Production > Outprint Preview. In the print world this is called separations and let’s someone examine the colors in their document. Since we have a one color, PMS 3155 U, document, that should be the only color that we can control in our separation preview. CMYK will always appear but in order to check the separations, click the check mark next to the PMS 3155U label. This should turn off our spot color and show us that there are no other colors being used in our document. Scroll through our pages and make sure no artwork or text is appearing. If there is you have to go back to InDesign or Illustrator and change that color to your spot color and reproduce the PDF.

So we have our project created, the bleeds and margins are correct, it separates to one color and we are happy with the design and information and all. We are ready to print. It’s always good to have your printer’s pre-press person re-check your documents. They probably will anyways but if you request it, they can work with you to make your files correct. Production artists always appreciate a customer who wants to learn how to make the files correct. Guaranteed that if you make an effort to correct your mistakes on your own, printers will help you by saving you expensive typesetting time and will be more willing to help you out in future design and set-up questions.

In Conclusion

That’s it. That’s the way a print file is set-up. Here’s a list of things to consider that weren’t covered at length in this tutorial…

1. Always make your document size the finished size of the actual project. Never make a document bigger and then design the project inside of it. For example, if you were designing business cards, don’t make the document 8.5 x 11 and design the 3.5 x 2 business card inside that 8.5 x 11 document size.

2. Always zoom in to about 300% on your PDF and see if any of the artwork or text looks pixelated. If so, consider finding a higher resolution picture or resetting the type.

3. If you are making a 1-3 color document always make sure to NEVER include CMYK colors. If you are making a CMYK document, spot colors can be converted to CMYK but may not match the PMS exactly. CMYK colors can not be converted to PMS colors all the time.

4. Always proof your projects and never rely on the printer to catch mistakes. Especially if you are supplying your own files. Printer’s aren’t responsible for the information or design you create.

Thanks for reading and hope you enjoyed the tutorial. More tutorials and articles are always being added.

Here are some links to related articles.

Designing for Print – Setting Up Crops and Bleed
Create a Business Card in Illustrator and Print it with UPrinting
Printing & Prepress Basics
Create a Five-color Magazine Cover using a Spot Metallic
Creating a Rockstar Brand, Logo & Styleguide in Illustrator