1990: East and West Germany reunited as the Cold War ended. The first Persian Gulf War began when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Two new shows on TV that fall were The Simpsons and Seinfeld. Driving Miss Daisy won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
And this is how state-of-the-art desktop publishing and page layout software arrived. Aldus released PageMaker 4.0, complete with hard copy instruction manuals and installation software on floppy disks. Only five years old, Aldus had introduced PageMaker for the Mac in 1985, and for the PC in 1987. By 1994, Adobe Systems had acquired the company.
It seems antiquated now, but the print and design business has seen a revolution over the past two decades in techonological advancement. Somehow a box full of floppy disks seems quaint and a little reassuring. It won’t be long until our iPads and mobile apps will seem equally dated and cause us to smile.
Rely on your printer for advice and direction in design, print and integrated marketing. They should be able to guide you through the latest changes and introduce new technology to help get your message out… if they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!
ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
Judging a book by its cover is, in most cases, not a wise idea. But that old adage tends to diminish the importance that a cover plays in the interaction we have with a book. Judging by the cover may be unwise, but the impression a cover gives is very influential. The very mention of a book title can immediately brings to mind the image of its cover – that image becomes tied to the work, the author, the experience of reading the novel. Below are a few samples that got impressed into my memory over the years:
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The cover was painted by Francis Cugat, and it is said that Fitzgerald was so enamored with the work (which was completed before he had finished his novel) that he incorporated it into his story. Entitled “Celestial Eyes,” it is probably one of the most iconic and best known covers in publishing history.
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute – Grace Paley
Edward Hopper’s “Compartment C, Car 293,” an oil painting of a young woman reading on a train, is a beautiful illustration for Gracy Paley’s collection of short stories, all set in New York. Once read, its hard not to see Paley’s narrator Faith as the woman on the train.
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
and The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Such simliar covers for two very different books. The straightforward serif font in yellow on a classic crimson background reveals very little about the story inside Catcher in the Rye, yet is without a doubt inextricably tied to the story in the minds of millions of readers. Similarly Burgess’ futuristic distopian thriller could seem almost too bizarre to evoke in such a simple cover. Amazing how the simple skewing of the sans serif title diagonally across the orange background does the job wonderfully.
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway and
Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
Two favorite novels of mine – but not what I would consider great book covers. In a way, they seem lazy – almost as if someone decided “Hey, this image will work, won’t it?” But these two images are what springs to mind whenever I hear these titles. Would a better choice have made for a better reading experience as well?
It’s interesting to notice the frequency with which classic paintings by great masters, that generally have nothing to do with the novel they are chosen to represent, are so often the choice for cover designs – and are an uncannily perfect fit. Penguin Classics is one publisher that relies heavily on this technique, finding classic portraits that seem to perfectly represent the character in a novel.
In my opinion, the best book cover designs often lean toward simplicity and minimalism. There is something powerful in sensing the feel or meaning of a novel’s theme in just the barest of images, or color, or font placement… a simple, eloquent cover that hints at the complexity within. (Regardless of the cover, if you haven’t read the novels above, do yourself a favor and check them out. All great reads.)
Rely on your printer for advice and direction in design and branding decisions. They have years of experience working with the entire gamut of design trends and tastes. If they can’t help you, they will know who can! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!
ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
In a steady, pervasive way, our economy has shifted from one where the greatest value is produced in the manufacture of goods and services to one where the greatest value is mined from data, ideas and knowledge. In such an information age, being generous with your knowledge and expertise carries a great reward. Get that information, advice, data and news out to your public with a newsletter – one that is printed, mailed and cross-purposed into an e-mail resource. You can compile the newsletter from your online blog content, or work in reverse… build your blog with the information you have gathered for your newsletter communications. While information about sales, new product lines and commerce is important, the talent and technical education you and your staff have in your field is perhaps even more valuable to your clients. Sharing it with them will make you trusted and remembered.
Content is king
For sure, all of this can be time-consuming. As small business owners, that time is precious and often scarce both for you and your staff. To help, below are some helpful tips for gathering and preparing great newsletter content.
Name your newsletter. You don’t have to be overly catchy or clever, but think of your newsletter as your own magazine, with a unique title and a clear editorial focus. A suitable, memorable name will allow it to stand out and be recognized once you have loyal readers.
Share your personality. No matter how clinical or technical your field, relay your excitement and interest in what you do for a living in a human voice. Inject your personality into the copy and let readers feel there is a person behind what is being written. Consider including a photo of yourself or your staff as well to establish that human connection with your readers.
Write what you know – use who you know. The information you already possess in running your successful business is your richest source for content. Write about your company’s mission, goals, decision making process, failures and successes. And be sure to rely on your staff as well. Every employee is a source for topic ideas and stories based on their unique experience and knowledge within the company. At the very least, require each employee to submit one story idea a month. Make contacts with other industry blogs online and ask to “guest-blog” an article for them in exchange for one of their own.
Take lots of photos – use them wisely. While stock photography serves a great purpose, nothing is more authentic than photographs you have taken yourself of relevant scenes, people, and products. Since you most likely have a great camera in your smartphone, remember to use it throught your work day. They can be used to illustrate your articles.
Establish serialized columns. Familiarity is an asset when you are vying for a reader’s time. Set up one or two features that appear in every issue of your newsletter. For instance, “FAQ’s” or “Did You Know….” or “Ask an Expert” are all regular column ideas that people are comfortable with and can easily browse.
Write smart headlines. To catch someone’s eye, headlines and graphics are at the top of the list. But remember a good headline also needs to accurately describes the topic of the article. I notice many publications rely on an incessant use of puns, song and movie titles or catchy “plays on words” as headlines. For instance, a story wind velocity and roof repair gets called “Gone With the Wind.” Is it really that funny? No. Does it explain what the article is about? Well, beyond the fact that it involves wind, no. It’s clear an editorial choice has been made that requires each article use this device as a headline. It becomes tiresome and misleading. A great pun can work well as a headline – feel free to get creative – but straight talk can also do the job.
Be accessbile. Use your newsletter to provide as many ways as possible for someone to reach you: phone numbers, web addresses and links, maps to your locations both online and in the real world. Let people know you want them to be in touch.
Do not think of your newsletter as a piece of paper. Yes, you will want to print, mail and distribute physical copies of your newsletters to employees, current clients and the public. But begin to think of the newsletter as the information itself. It will take the form of a printed piece, but can also be repurposed into blog posts, e-newsletters, and website information. Just be sure to learn the rules for email marketing and don’t let yourself inadvertently run afoul of the CAN-SPAM act.
Employ social media and the internet. Staying in touch with your industry peers online through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and relevant trade association or industry websites provides you with a wealth of topic information and inspiration for your content, as well as serving as an avenue to promote your newsletter/blog/website. Check out exmples of other newsletters and a plethora of blog posts like this one giving advice on how to write, design and distribute your newsletters. Stay connected.
Be consistent. If you plan to publish a monthly newsletter, stick to your schedule. Do not miss a month, especially early on when you are hoping to gain reader loyalty. Also, be consistent in your editorial approach.
Rely on your printer for advice and direction in creating and distributing your newsletters, by mail or online. They should be able to provide you with everything from encouragement all the way to the complete design, layout, copywriting, production, multi-purposing and distribution of your periodic marketing outreach. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!
ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
They say nature abhors a vaccum… apparently so do graphic design clients. For many, the impulse to fill up every available space with type or artwork can clutter or completely derail a project. A staple of good design, the wise use of white space can lend an air of sophistication to a layout, and should always be a consideration in any style of design. But when a specific minimalist look is desired, editing and balance are crucial in order to maintain the open real estate needed to create an effective version of this classic look. Its usually helpful to agree upon that basic style at the onset – otherwise the need to “fill in” generally takes over.
Great use of white space in cocollective.com design
Many years ago in my first contact with graphic design, I was on the “annual staff” at my high school, creating the page layouts for the yearbook. Now this was the late 70s and well before computers or software. Page elements were sketched out on actual size graph paper in blue pencil. Measurements for the printer were done in picas. Photos and text were given corresponding numbers for placement, and the photos were “cropped” by marking the actual desired size on the developed photo with a grease pencil. Wow – seems primitive now. Anyway, my point is one of the ideas we were presented with as students was a page layout they called “isolated element” – one side of the layout might have a collage of pictures or text with the other side having one single photo. Clearly, the isolated photo was the focus of attention. We were told to use this design idea sparingly, if at all. Minimalism –they thought it was a little bit radical I guess.
Minimalist design of studioantwork.com
What I did not understand at the time was that the space in between the photos was an element as well. An essential point in this creative process is seeing that the “empty” space is really not empty at all. It exists in contrast to the other elements on the page as well as being defined by them – it has “weight” and structure. Similarly, it does not even have to be white. Minimalist design can use black or any color as its base. The open areas exist visually in the design as powerfully as any other element.
Generally employed when a more upscale or luxury approach is desired, minimalist design relies on structure, great typography and an understanding of balance. Some white space is considered passive – such as the space between the lines of type or the border area of a page. By contrast, active white space would be the territory left open on purpose between design elements. Both passive and active white space are planned and controlled in a well-designed piece of work. Though not a solution for every project, minimalist design with an effective use of white space is a powerful technique.
One good habit you will develop as you explore a minimalist approach is the necessity to prioritize and condense. The design itself requires you to decide what information is essential, and what is fluff – a good practice on any project. It reminds me of an episode of “Absolutely Fabulous” where Edina is running around her apartment knocking things off of counters saying “Surfaces! I must have surfaces!” Or even better, when she flashes back to her college days where her minimalist friends had an apartment totally white with nothing in it but a tiny picture hanging by a thread.
The first step toward effective use of white space in design is to see that open space as an element itself. Great articles are easy to find online about the use and theory behind white space in design, as well as inspiring galleries to convince you of the beauty and functionality of this style of design.
ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
Twitter uses a specific blue – not the same as Facebook blue, or Ford blue, or “Big Blue” IBM. Coke always wants the same red, whether its on a T-shirt, paper, plastic, a television screen or a glass bottle. To reproduce color consistently, especially across different media, platforms, techonologies and visual arenas, everyone needs to be communicating in the same language of color, so to speak. The PANTONE® Matching System is that language – an industry standard and means of selecting, communicating, reproducing, matching and controlling colors. For offset, lithographic printing, Pantone created a Color Formula Guide with well over 1000 classified colors that fill the CMYK gamut. From a set of basic inks, each of these colors can be mixed.
For spot color printing, the Pantone Guide contains ink mixing instrusctions for each color, a “recipe” with amounts given both in parts and percentages. If a printer needs a large quantity of ink, or is doing regular printing for clients who use a specific color for their brand, these inks will be purchased premixed. But for smaller quantities, each color in the Pantone Guide can be created with a mixture of 2 or more of 14 standard base colors. They are: Yellow, Yellow 012, Orange 021, Warm Red, Red 032, Rubine Red, Rhodamine Red, Purple, Violet, Blue 072, Reflex Blue, Process Blue, Green, and Black.
In the image above, our printer is mixing PMS 151 Orange for a client’s job. The formula for that exact color is 12 parts of PANTONE Yellow (or 75%) and 4 parts of PATNONE Warm Red (or 25%). For this small amount of ink needed, he weighs each ink amount on a scale and then mixes thoroughly together for the correct color match, which is then tested alongside the PANTONE preprinted swatch for that color to doublecheck the outcome.
Pantone recently unveiled their cloud system of color management, PANTONELive: “a cloud-based color bank.” It is a color management system for companies and brand owners who do marketing over a large variety of media and across a diverse geographical area to ensure everyone is speaking that same color language.
ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
Today ImageSmith surprised me with a little celebration for my 15th anniversary with the company and a very generous gift of a brand new iPad. Our discussion at the gathering centered around the changes in our business over the past 15 years and the vast differences technology has created in that relatively brief span of time. Back in 1997, hardly anyone at work had a mobile phone; few used the internet or even had a home computer.
Oddly enough, I had been reading online this very morning about the new issue of Newsweek that highlights the return of the show “Mad Men” with a retro 60s issue and an amazing recreation of retro print advertising from that era. The rate of change in this industry from then to now has exponentially increased. Print quickly adapted to new computer technology in the ’80s, drastically altering the way graphics are created, business is done and ultimately the very heart of what the printing industry is today. From my own experience here at ImageSmith, I could see the major ways technology has created this rapid change:
THE INTERNET
In the 90s, the art department was completely a Mac platform (Mac certainly led the way with graphics software and innovation) and the only other computers were PCs used for the front office and accounting. Files were transferred on floppy disks or zip disks. Proofs were faxed or hand delivered. The idea of communication or doing business via the internet seemed fanciful.
TODAY: communication inside and beyond the company is via the internet. Computers network through a wifi connection and a central server. Orders are placed online, files transferred, deliveries scheduled and tracked… to do otherwise would seem painfully slow and unprofitable.
SOFTWARE
The change in graphics software is always rapid and amazing. In 1997, we were using Adobe PageMaker for our layout (it had only recently been acquired by Adobe from Aldus). PhotoShop and Illustrator were used for photo and graphics manipulation, but only minimally integrated with the actual desktop layout duties of PageMaker. Many clients created their jobs in QuarkXpress, Microsoft Word, Corel Draw – and the confusing task of the art department was to try to handle and image these files cross platform from PC to Mac without disastrous font conflicts and software glitches. The idea of a “portable document format” or pdf was on the horizon.
TODAY: Adobe Creative Suite provides virtually flawless integration of PhotoShop, Illustrator, Acrobat and InDesign. A totally pdf workflow moves client jobs seamlessly from desktop to press or web. Print design can be cross-purposed to web pages, mobile apps, e-books, etc.
PRINTING TECHNOLOGY
Many jobs were still created physically on paper and then photographed. “Paste-up” was the means of gluing into position different page elements. It all seems very primitive now. The process of making plates for offset printing also relied on photography. Negatives were imaged, stripped into position, manually color separated, and burned onto plates.
TODAY: Computer-to-plate and computer-to-press techonology completely removes the photographic element in printing. Digital layouts are rasterized and imaged onto plates for the press in exact position. Increasingly, digital presses are replacing the offset process to meet the growing demand for short run, full color print.
DATA STORAGE
In 1997, a typical print job would fit easily onto a standard 3.5 inch, 1.44MB floppy disk. Artwork and client jobs were archived onto floppies. These were replaced by SyQuests – able to hold 44 or 88 MB or data, and then Zip Disks from iOmega with the amazing capacity to hold 100 MB. In the late 90s, most all computers, PC and Mac, came with a built-in floppy and Zip drive. Over the years, the Zip yielded to the CD and then the DVD for removable storage options.
TODAY: File sizes for some print jobs today dwarf the capacity of all of these removable data storage devices. High capacity servers and cloud-based storage solutions manage files and the process of archiving data.
With all of these changes has come a core redefinition of what small and mid-sized print operations are about. Printers have expanded to become multi-media specialists, marketing consultants and e-commerce solution providers to meet the equally drastic changing needs of their clients. Integrated marketing techniques combine the realms of print with mobile, email, wide format printing, signage, printwear, branded merchandise and social media. Looking ahead to the landscape of the NEXT fifteen years is exciting and daunting. Mobile and cloud-based technology will continue to drive the marketing into the world of augmented reality, 3-D printing, conductive ink and other as-yet unknown innovations.
ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
After writing a recent blog-post about the significant role of print and paper in our culture, I started thinking about how that has to show up in our popular music as well. And since blog-posts love to take the form of lists, why not take a look at how print, paper, and ink have been portrayed in popular song…
Paperback Writer – The Beatles (1966)
Seems appropriate to start the list with a classic from pop music’s royalty. The paperback novel emerged in it’s mass market format in the 1930s, and quickly became the affordable, accessible way for works both great and less than great to reach new mass markets of readers. Lennon & McCartney show a man desperate to land a job as just such an author. 1000 pages? That’s one thick paperback.
If You Could Read My Mind – Gordon Lightfoot (1970)
Sticking with the theme of a paperback novel, the simile in Lightfoot’s ode to lost love is a comparison between his thoughts and a book, “the kind the drug stores sell.” The hero, the broken heart, the ending that’s “just too hard to take.” A ton of romance novels have carried that plot-line over the years.
Everyday I Write the Book – Elvis Costello (1983)
The best example I know of a song trying to be a book – Costello describes his love affairs ups and downs as chapters, paragraphs, seeing himself as a man with a mission in “two or three editions.” He knows that regardless of how the affair plays out, he will “still own the film rights and be working on the sequel.”
Paper Roses – Marie Osmond (1973)
Well, originally is was Anita Bryant who had a hit with this tune. But a very young Osmond, well before Weight Watchers and Dancing With the Stars, sang about a false love with a comparison between real roses and ones made of paper. Let’s make it clear, however, paper roses last longer than the real thing, are also biodegradable, and require no pesticides to produce. No reason to go around knocking paper roses!
Centerfold – The J. Geils Band (1982)
An iconic publishing image, the centerfold of a magazine was spotlighted in this 80’s song about a young man discovering his high school homeroom angel in a porn magazine.
Black and White – Three Dog Night (1972)
A hit in 1972 for Three Dog Night, the song uses the image of ink on paper to flesh out their metaphor of racial equality and harmony. Interestingly enough, the song was first written in 1954 in response to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling desegregating public schools. The original verse: “Their robes were black, Their heads were white, The schoolhouse doors were closed so tight. Nine judges all set down their names, To end the years and years of shame.” Pretty cool, huh?
Yesterday’s Papers – The Rolling Stones (1967)
A lesser known Stones ballad compares a fading love affair to old newspapers. A clear illustration of how print and the daily newspaper for many years were central to our culture: “Every day means the turn of a page / Yesterday’s papers are such bad news / Same thing applies to me and you.”
Want Ads – Honey Cone (1971)
A big hit in the early 70s, long before match.com, Tindr or Grindr. This song, redone by Taylor Dayne in the 90s, is about a time not so long ago when trying to find a match by running an ad in the classified section of the newspaper was a novel approach. “He’s been lying… I’m going to the Evening News.”
Signs – The Five Man Electrical Band (1971)
A big, angry protest song from the early 70s, this tune decries the exclusion and intolerance of society for the “long-haired, freaky people.” The printed signs… “blocking up the scenery, breaking my mind.”
Paper and Ink – Tracy Chapman (2000)
Chapman’s fifth album reminds us how print can be valued – especially when printing money.
Legal Tender – The B-52’s (1983)
When print goes bad: the B-52s gave us what is arguably the best dance song ever about a federal crime. Jelly jars and heavy equipment, the B’s were in the basement learning to print.
Any songs yet about a Kindle or iPad? I don’t know, but I’m sure there soon will be. I purposely didn’t include any songs here about letters or mail – there seem to be enough good titles on that topic to merit a future blog-post.
ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
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Too often as printers, we assume everyone else understands the basics of print technology. Full color, spot color, process, digital, offset, thermography, letterpress, wide format… there are many paths to create a beautiful and effective printed product – decisions have to be made about which path is the best to take. The type of printing you need for your project should take into account many factors: budget, branding concerns, time constraints, intended use, and essentially the overall scope of your marketing plan. It becomes important that you have a printer you can communicate with freely and clearly. Your printer should be able to explain your options clearly. One basic topic in looking at the options for color printing is to understand what is meant by spot colors vs. full color.
Spot color refers to color generated in offset printing by a single ink. That ink could be a “pure” color or mixed according to a formula. Process, or 4-color printing, uses four spot colors to generate a full-color gamut: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK). Some more advanced processes use six spot colors, adding Orange and Green to provide an even larger gamut. This is called hexachromatic process printing, or CMYKOG. At times, however, you may want to print using just one or two colors – for example let’s say blue and black. This is a classic example of two color printing.
Pantone is clearly the authority on color – a provider of color systems and leading technology for accurate communication of color. The Pantone Matching System has long been the standard for defining “spot colors.” If you have a blue lion in your logo, you want that lion to always appear in the same shade of blue – not sky blue on your letterhead, royal blue on an employee’s shirt and some shade of purple on the website. The PMS system is a way to standardize that color for the printing process, and your printer can show you swatches to select the PMS number that you can then define as an integral part of your brand. Also keep in mind that with these two colors, you can enhance the design of your piece by using “screens” or tints of those colors. 50% of black gives gray; a percentage of the PMS blue will provide varying shades as well. With a good design, a two-color printed piece can have much depth and style. (Pantone is a rich resource for all topics on color. Check out which color they chose Color of the Year for 2012.)
Any PMS color, printed from a single ink, can also be translated into the closest CMYK match. Your blue lion can be printed by the 4-color process method when you choose to create a full color piece. There will be a slight variation in the shade or hue of the blue, however – no PMS to CMYK conversion is exact. In most cases, the difference is tolerable or even unoticeable, but with a few colors the shift is more dramatic. The CMYK gamut can not replicate all colors visible to the human eye. Again, your printer can show you side-by-side swatches of what the PMS color will look like once converted to CMYK. Some brands are so specific about their color that they budget for 5-color offset print jobs where full color printing is needed, but they are willing to pay for another pass to get the PMS color of that lion exactly right every time.
Have the discussion with your printer to learn the process they are using to produce your print materials. They can explain about color gamuts, PMS color matches, and even color psychology and selection. You will also want to translate these colors for other uses such as your website or online marketing. There you will need web-safe color matches that seek to maintain an accurate match for your blue lion on the web as well. You will be in good hands with a printer who can help you with both the artistic, creative process and the technical concerns of production.
ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
We love paper. Its feel, smell, texture, weight. Selecting the right paper for a print project is an important part of the design of any printed piece. We understand that most designers and print buyers are not experts on paper, nor do they have the time to become one! They, therefore, rely on a good relationship with their printer to make smart paper selections. It can get confusing: matte, glossy, semi-gloss, premium, UV coating, lamination, caliper, grain direction, brightness, opacity. Then there’s all the information about recyclable content, chain of custody and other green concerns. Throw in the chemistry involved when ink or toner hits the paper and you encounter terms like dot gain, absorbency, coating, rasterization. A lot of science lives behind the manufacture of paper and the printing process itself. So how do you begin to choose the right paper for your job in the face of so many choices?
Let’s start with a wide view, by looking at a few manufacturers of quality lines of paper for print. Below are a few of our favorites – papers that are affordable, yet offer top quality performance. They all come in offerings of varied finishes, grades, weights, colors and are optimized for both press and digital printing.
Sappi Flo – an industry standard print paper at an affordable price. High quality and environmentally sustainable. (Sappi also produces a hilarious online video series about the insanity in a local print shop called “Off Register.” Well worth checking out!)
Domtar Cougar – a great environmental choice, Cougar papers offer vibrant color contrast, smoothness and high quality.
Classic from Neenah – the Classic line from Neenah, aptly named, offers best-in-class quality, performance, compatibility and availability. The family includes Classic Crest, Classic Columns, Classic Cotton, Classic Laid and Classic Linen.
Mohawk – fine paper and envelopes, engineered for brilliant color, runability and detailed images.
There are five basic grades of paper: bond, offset or uncoated book, coated book, text, and cover. Within each of these grades are varieties of content, appearance, end use, original purpose, grain direction, finish, opacity, brightness… you get the idea. You have a LOT of choices. And in the realm of specialty papers, there are even more. With your printer’s help, you can narrow down what selection will work best for your project and budget. All major paper manufacturers are happy to supply samples, information and guidance on paper purchases.
In the process of browsing for the right paper, you might get curious about some terms you run across, such as sizing (a solution added to paper pulp to make it less absorbent), brightness (the percentage of a wavelength of blue light that paper reflects), caliper (the thickness of a sheet of paper, measured in 1/1000ths of an inch and referred to as point size), or acid free (paper with no acid, they have a pH higher than 7 and alkaline properties to resist aging). For a great detailed glossary of all things paper, check out the Glatfelter site. They are a global provider of specialty print papers. Or call us. As mentioned earlier… we love paper.
ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
If you work in the print or design business for any length of time, you will acquire a few stories to tell about typos, mistakes, and gaffes that escaped undetected by the proofing process. We proof carefully, and we encourage clients to be diligent in proofing before signing off on even the simplest of jobs. But even the sharpest proofreader lets a mistake slip by occasionally, and we are powerless once the ink hits the paper and the paper leaves the building. It says something about the power of print that once these mistakes are out in the public domain, they seem to carry so much weight. Today, with Photoshop and the ease of photo editing, the problems that use to exist with typos and misspelled words have now moved into the realm of images. Careless photo editing can result in some really humorous and costly mistakes.
Glad I saw these legs hiding among the pool furniture before showing the client a proof.
My most recent flub involved the photograph above. This time, I caught it before it made it’s way to the client or, even worse, the press. In removing a person from the background of a larger photograph at the customer’s request, I neglected to remove the bottom part of her legs. There they stand amongst the deck furniture, smirking… an innocent, though sloppy, oversight.
Many times, however, edits are not the result of mistakes, and are viewed by the public in a much more negative manner. The fashion industry receives harsh criticism for their over-zealous use of the Photoshop edit in their print marketing. Many have taken already thin models and edited them down to impossibly thin results. Magazine covers routinely edit away the size and curves of women. The effect of these industry practices on the body image of young girls and women is troublesome to many. Companies like Ralph Lauren and Ann Taylor have suffered negative effects from public backlash by going too far with these edits. (Check out this video, Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising’s Image of Women.)
In an odd twist on the topic of “Photoshopping,” the New York Department of Health recently fell under fire for using a stock photo of an overweight man from Getty Images and digitally “removing” his leg to make him look like an amputee. The photo was used as part of a controversially graphic ad campaign that sought to link soda consumption to Diabetes. In this case, the photo edits were done well, but the fact that the photo was assumed to be non-edited drew the complaints of many who thought the ad campaign either inaccurate or too graphic.
We seem to want to trust that photographs are telling a story of fact – that they are evidence of a slice of reality. Yet we know photographs can be altered in perfectly convincing ways to tell whatever story we want them to. The result is we take some satisfaction in spotting the mistakes of a sloppy Photoshop guru – almost as if we uncovered someone trying to dupe us by the manipulation of the photo.
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