IMAGESMITH has been hard at work here in western North Carolina providing print and marketing solutions for small and medium sized businesses for 40 years. We are happy to have been nominated as a Top NC Printing Company by The Startup Pill for our innovation and expertise in navigating a quickly changing marketing landscape. You can check out the rest of this list of great Tarheel print innovators here.
We love print, and the expanding and powerful role it plays in today’s ever-changing marketing mix. Still, the term “printer” can sound misleading. Today, printers do far more than put ink on paper. We have become media communications specialists for business owners and marketers, and we are your closest and most knowledgeable sources for consulting on your overall marketing strategy. A good printer will understand your budget, your marketing goals, and be able to suggest many strategies for creating results: integrated marketing strategies, direct mail, targeted variable data printing, promotional products, signage, branding, website development and e-commerce, social media marketing techniques, and unique design ideas. Discuss with them your target audience, your brand goals, who your consumer is, what your mission, budget, and specific goals are for the year. Together, we can develop and recommend specific marketing strategies that you can use to translate into profit and customer recognition of your brand and your work. The bottom line: why drain your energy trying to learn the new world of marketing on TOP of running your business when you already have a marketing consultant waiting to talk with you?
Call us at 828.684.4512 for any marketing needs. As a printer, we understand communication, design, and teamwork. Your printer should be able to provide you with the latest information, inspiration, technical advice, and innovative ideas for communicating your message through print, design and typography, signage, apparel, variable data printing and direct mail, integrated marketing and environmentally responsible printing. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!
ImageSmith is now partnered with Extreme Awards & Engraving – our in-house partner providing custom engraved trophies and awards for employee recognition programs, sporting events, and promotional needs. With our new sister company, we will be sharing space, resources and expertise in a collaboration designed to further provide you with one place to meet all of your marketing needs… Under One Roof! Visit them online at www.extremeae.com or call direct at 828.684.4538.
ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
Trade show booths, converted envelopes, coffee mugs, die cut folders, POS displays, folded mailpieces… what first step do all these design projects share? In each case, you will want to ask for a template from your printer before you design.
The print, signage and promotional products world continues to diversify with custom branding opportunities that allow you to print on just about any object you could want. Throw in the creative use of die-cuts, spot coatings, textures, and folds and starting your project layout on the right foot becomes all the more important. For the designer, that means working with vendor-supplied templates to make sure your design ends up printing in the right spot with no expensive surprises or added cost.
Vendors are usually glad to supply a pre-press template for your specific project. In fact, many require your files be submitted on their template – and for very good reason. The positioning, size, and bleed area are critical for successful output on projects using various substrates and printing surfaces, and complex bindery or finishing processes. When you submit files that need no adjustments, you save prepress and art department fees that would be needed to correct or modify your files, or perhaps save having to pay for a job that did not print as you hoped.
Often, however, instructions are vague about exactly HOW to work with the template. Here are a few pointers that may help. In MOST cases, the template you will receive is a PDF. If you are using the most common desktop publishing software – anything from Quark Xpress to the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite – the PDF can be used in several ways to guide your layout without getting in the way of your work.
We love Illustrator for many great reasons and it is generally our preferred software for design of promotional products, wide format signage, vehicle wraps, and even some regular print jobs that have complex die cuts or folds. The PDF template can be placed into Illustrator like an object, on its own layer, and used as a guide. But the most helpful way is to begin by choosing File–Open With (rather than just File Open) and pick Illustrator as your app rather than Acrobat. (If, as sometimes happens, the template PDF uses fonts that your computer does not have, just ignore the warnings. While they may not print well on your end, the vendor who made the template will have them, so no problem.)
Templates are almost always vector objects that will open and be editable in Illustrator. Of course you don’t want to edit the template, but it can be helpful to have the ability to manipulate it when using many layers or when you need to hide parts of the template in order to proof your project to a customer. You may also need to copy and use curved shapes or other features of the template when creating masks or other design elements.
Many PDF templates are very user-friendly in Illustrator. They use specific non-printing colors to designate the layout and help you see the placement of things like folds, edges and dyelines while specifying how much bleed area you need to allow as well. They will generally have the template elements on locked layers so you don’t accidentally edit them. Most have a blank layer already prepared for you to work on. If not, always leave the template on it’s own layer(s) and create a new layer to contain your print elements.
Sometimes, it is preferable to prepare your layout in InDesign or another page layout application. You can simply File–Place the PDF template into your document. It makes sense to create – and lock – a layer just for the template file. You can then turn visibility on and off as needed and move it up or down in the layer order as well. Your document size in InDesign should be the same size as the entire template, including crop marks if applicable. Upon export, you would generally turn all fonts to outlines and create your PDF/X1A with no crops or bleeds other than whats included in the template.
These PDF templates generally include other important information to guide your design. They will specify whether you need to use PMS spot colors or stick to all process. They define needed bleed area. And they usually spell out the resolution, size, and embedding specs for any images you include.
Templates save time, headache, and money throughout the course of your design project. Make it a practice to ask ahead of time for a template, and make the template your friend.
Call us at 828.684.4512 for any marketing needs. As a printer, we understand communication and design. Your printer should be able to provide you with the latest information, inspiration, technical advice, and innovative ideas for communicating your message through print, design and typography, signage, apparel, variable data printing and direct mail, integrated marketing and environmentally responsible printing. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!
ImageSmith is now partnered with Extreme Awards & Personalization – our in-house partner providing custom engraved trophies and awards for employee recognition programs, sporting events, and promotional needs. With our new sister company, we will be sharing space, resources and expertise in a collaboration designed to further provide you with one place to meet all of your marketing needs… Under One Roof! Visit them online at www.extremeae.com or call direct at 828.684.4538.
Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
We discussed the conflict between transparency and spot colors, and the ensuing print problems, in a previous blog post. That content is included below, but in addition we added some more information on how to resolve this conflict if you have already created your files in InDesign or Illustrator and either been contacted by your printer for file revisions, or worse, received a print job with “unexpected results.”
Using a spot or PMS color in a layout often makes sense to the designer – after all, we all want to ensure correct color output across our brand. But when you place a spot color logo, for example, in a project bound for CMYK process printing, you may be setting up a conflict that can ruin your print output. When you go to save or output your file to pdf, you may see the above warning – and it is an important one! If you have used a spot or PMS color in your InDesign, Quark or Illustrator layout and then applied some type of transparency effect — drop shadows, blending modes, gradients, feathering, etc — then this warning is telling you that your file will NOT print correctly. Your file will look fine on screen, and often even when printed from a desktop printer, but high quality print output will be compromised. Controlling your Swatches palette and color usage, and understanding color definitions, can prevent this problem. First a little background…
With the release of InDesign 2.0 back in 2001, Adobe integrated transparency effects directly into its layout program. New tools allowed us to apply editable transparency effects to text, graphics, and images, the result being a greatly enhanced set of design tools. PDF 1.4 debuted in Acrobat 5 at this time as the first version of PDF that supported transparency. The only catch was that most printer’s RIPs at the time were not ready to handle the transparency effects. Havoc ensued.
Times have changed since then and Postscript level 3 processors and pdf workflows effectively manage the flattening of transparent files at the correct time to produce accurate output. But the conflict between spot or PMS colors and transparency lives on. Saving your file as a PDF/X-1a doesn’t prevent the problem either as the X-1a definition allows for both spot and cmyk color definitions.
If your InDesign or Illustrator color palette is using nothing but CMYK (or RGB and LAB) colors, you can use transparency with no problems. If you place, for example, your logo or a piece of art with a predefined PMS or spot color into your layout, then you have imported that color into your Swatches palette. In turn, if you apply that swatch to color text or graphics and use a transparency effect on them, a high resolution output from offset or digital printing will result in the object printing as a blank or with an unintended color. Your print provider will most likely NOT be able to convert the spot color to process and retain the correct transparency effect. You must convert the spot color to process in your native file(s) and re-export to pdf.
The PMS Green with a transparency effect added will appear correctly on screen (left), but print as a solid (right).
The Fix: Keep Strict Control Over the Colors & Color Definitions in Your Swatches Palette
If you place your Spot Color logo into InDesign, that PMS color shows up in your Swatches palette and can not be removed or edited. (Deleting the logo will allow you to remove the swatch or change it.) So the simplest way to avoid any problems – and save time and prepress charges – is to create a CMYK version of your Spot Color logo for use in all projects bound for CMYK output, and to keep a close eye on all the colors that show up in your palette.
If you have already designed your project with spot colors brought in from placed artwork, getting rid of or redefining all those colors can be difficult. Replacing the artwork with CMYK versions is the first step. Once you have done that, the palette will allow you to delete and replace any UNUSED PMS swatches, or to redefine them to CMYK. This weeding out process can be complex, depending on how many colors have been created. In InDesign, you can delete color swatches tied only to native InDesign elements (i.e., not originating in any placed artwork) and be prompted to choose another color for all those elements currently using the one you are deleting. The final test is to choose “Remove all Unused Colors” from the pop-out menu on the Swatches Palette. If any PMS color swatches still remain, that color is being used somewhere in your layout. If it doesn’t interact in any way with a transparency effect, that will be fine. But if it does, you will get those dreaded “unexpected results.”
The Swatches Palette can quickly become a swamp of colors with conflicting names and definitions.
Obviously, the easiest fix is to be aware as you build your file of the colors in your palette, and notice how they change with each piece of artwork you place. If you see a PMS color show up, you know that last placed logo or element is bringing in that color. If you then use that color for a drop shadow, gradient, or transparent effect, it will not output correctly. Learn to control your swatches by experimenting with editing, changing and deleting them – getting an understanding of the differences in CMYK, LAB, RGB and spot color modes.
Why is “Transparency” Creating Trouble?
Before being “flattened”, transparency is considered “live” and exists as an optical effect onscreen and in video. It must be flattened in order to print. At this stage, the tranparent region is broken up into smaller non-transparent sections that can then be translated by the RIP (raster image processor) into a printable image. It is, however, a complex process and trouble spots arise from the use of spot colors as discussed above, where text or vector objects overlap pixel-based objects, and possibly with the overlapping of RGB and CMYK images. You can read Adobe’s Designers Guide for Transparency and Print at this link for further reference.
Rely on your printer for advice and direction with any questions you have when designing files that use transparency. They should be able to provide you with the time and money saving technical advice, and work with you on file preparation and submission. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer. The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!
Shop our full ImageSmith catalog online here. We can work with you to find the best option to suit your needs. Please note, prices in online catalog do not include decoration, but call us for a quote at 828.684.4512. 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.
The latest update for Adobe InDesign CC 2014 gives you a great new tool for creating a beautiful matching color palette based on the images and artwork already in your layout. The Color Theme tool will create for you 5 different 5-swatch palettes or themes of color with a simple click based on the objects you have selected on your page, which you can then add to your swatches palette or export to Adobe Color (formerly Kuler – will get to that in a moment) for use in other applications and on other devices.
If you have a photograph placed on your page, select the new tool then click the photo. The Color Theme tool will select a range or palette of colors based on that image. It will also work on a vector object, shape or a selected area of your layout including several different objects. A main 5-swatch color theme shows up automatically. By clicking on the down arrow you will see four additional “themes”: Colorful, Bright, Dark and Muted. These will give you variations of the basic theme from which to choose.
A button to the right allows you to add any or all of the themes to your Swatches palette. Option clicking that button will allow you to add just an individual color. The colors are by default defined according to your “document intent.” If you hadn’t noticed, whenever you create a new InDesign document, there is a drop-down menu called Intent where you choose if your creation is heading for the Print world, for the Web or for Digital Publishing (e-Pubs). By double clicking the actual Color Theme tool in the toolbar, you can choose to leave your colors “defined as per document intent” or go ahead and decide for yourself to have the colors rendered as CMYK or RGB. In the prepress department here, we were hoping the tool would include the magic of matching the closest PMS color to the selected sample, but no such luck…..yet.
Now here’s another new feature. Adobe Kuler is now Adobe Color. You can access your Creative Cloud Color account directly in InDesign by going to Window – Color – Adobe Color Themes. In the panel that opens, you can access all your previously defined Kuler… er, Color themes, explore the themes of others just as you did with the mobile app or online, or create new ones from scratch. Any themes you create in PhotoShop or Illustrator are also here to share. Adobe has integrated the favorite advancements of its former Kuler app directly into the Creative Cloud applications in a very seamless, easy to use way.
You can watch a couple of very brief overviews of these new features from Adobe by going to Help – What’s New… These new features are very intuitive and a great tool for your color inspiration. The integration of Adobe Color directly into the Creative Cloud apps is very handy and will be welcomed by the Kuler/Color community, though I’m already finding it difficult to stop calling it Kuler.
Strive to buy your print locally! A community printer will understand communication and design, with a special emphasis on your local market. They should be able to provide you with the latest information, inspiration, technical advice, and innovative ideas for communicating your message through print, design and typography, signage, apparel, variable data printing and direct mail, integrated marketing and environmentally responsible printing. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!
Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
With each new software upgrade, organizing your workspace and learning the new tools and interface changes can take a little time. Creative Cloud software generally launches by default a Welcome screen with helpful info on “What’s New” in the latest release. For the first few days, these are helpful; after that they begin to feel intrusive. With Illustrator CC 2014, the “Welcome” screen is pretty persistent in trying to keep on welcoming. The fix is a simple one – albeit not as simple as it could be!
In previous version of Illustrator, the Welcome screen appeared with each launch, but the checkbox to hide the screen on future launches was always located at the bottom in plain view. With InDesign CC 2014, it is still there and easy to access. With PhotoShop CC 2014, there is no “Welcome” screen – it just lives under the Help menu and will take you to an Adobe webpage when chosen. But Illustrator expanded the Welcome screen for CC 2014, putting in four tabs to access different information. I wonder if Adobe is pushing a little harder to introduce PhotoShop and InDesign users to Illustrator? The expanded screen can be useful, but it seems Adobe went a little further in trying to make you work to hide it.
The “Create” tab, which is the default screen on my installation and includes the easy access to open recent docs or new projects, does not include the box to hide the Welcome screen. I have no idea why. For some reason, only three of the four Welcome screen tabs have the check-able option to hide the window in the future. And, even on those three tabs, the bottom of the window is not visible until you scroll down to find the check box.
The Welcome screen info always lives under the Help menu, so if you find it annoying like I do, just click on any of the three tabs other than “Create” and scroll to the bottom of the window. There you can access the SLIGHTLY more elusive than normal “Don’t Show Welcome Screen Again” box.
Strive to buy your print locally! A community printer will understand communication and design, with a special emphasis on your local market. They should be able to provide you with the latest information, inspiration, technical advice, and innovative ideas for communicating your message through print, design and typography, signage, apparel, variable data printing and direct mail, integrated marketing and environmentally responsible printing. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!
Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
Illustrator CC 2014 brings graphic designers some cool new improvements to enhance the “drawing” experience of this vector program. I’ve always loved using Illustrator, although the disconnect between the feeling of drawing on paper vs. fashioning a vector shape onscreen can seem awkward. The new Illustrator perks: a more user-friendly Pen and Pencil tool and the new Live Shapes/Corners functionality give much more accessible controls to vector drawing and design. The best part of these new improvements? They are very intuitive. While an explanation or overview is helpful to know what has changed, the best way to understand them is to just get in there and create! The new tweaks will become second nature to a user with previous Illustrator experience in no time.
Live Corners – what a great enhancement for drawing and manipulating shapes! While this feature does nothing that was not possible in earlier versions of Illustrator, the sense of control is now much more integrated into the actual drawing process. Selecting any shape, or point on a shape, with the Direct Selection tool will reveal an on-art control point or “inset widget” at each of the corners. You can drag that widget to alter the shape of the corner. Double clicking the widget will open your dialog box for controls over the corner style (round, inverted round or chamfered), the corner radius dimension, and rounding that is Absolute or Relative. Option (or Alt) clicking will toggle between the three styles. Adobe offers some easy online video tutorials to cover all these features, but the process is so intuitive, just playing around with the new features is your best teacher. (BTW, I learned a new word with that “chamfered” corner feature.)
The Pencil tool, in CC 2014, has advanced away from being more of a freestyle drawing tool often relegated to imprecise sketching and moved more toward a companion of the Pen tool. Double clicking the Pencil tool in the Tools palette will bring up its Options where you can set the fidelity of the line you are creating to the actual movement of your cursor. This is a great way to smooth curves when needed, or to create sketchy curves when that is point. Holding down your Option (or Alt) key will constrain the Pencil tool to a straight line; holding down the Command (or Ctrl) key will constrain it to horizontal, vertical or 45° angles. As you can see, this is very much like the Pen tool. The Pencil tool also toggles out to access the Smooth and the Path Erase tools. The Smooth tool is a handy way to touch up a path shape with which you aren’t quite happy. It subtracts excess points and contours to create a smoother shape. The Path Erase tool is your eraser, pure and simple – even stopping mid-segment to create a new end point.
The CC 2014 Pen tool sports some major enhancements as well. One change you will notice right away is the Pen tool Path Preview. When drawing a shape, it is helpful to see exactly where the path will fall before dropping the point onto the document; this new tool previews that path for you with a colored preview line extending from the last point dropped to the position of the pen before you click in a new point. Adobe also gave us advancements on the manipulation of anchor points: repair broken anchor point handles, draw uneven handles when needed, and other new ways to finesse closing the shape of a path without distorting your drawing. The Pen tool in Illustrator has always been one of those tools that really needs hands-on practice to understand. Often the description of what or how the tool works is longer and much more confusing than the actual process of using it. So dive in – the new features will become second nature as you use the tools and incorporate the new perks into your work routine.
Launching Illustrator CC 2014 will bring up a Welcome screen that does a great job in introducing everything you need to know: the tabs for New Features, Getting Started, and Tips & Techniques include video tutorials and links to the great online library of Adobe help documents. (You can always access this screen when needed by going to Help – Welcome in the menu bar.) Have fun making some great vectors.
Strive to buy your print locally! A community printer will understand communication and design, with a special emphasis on your local market. They should be able to provide you with the latest information, inspiration, technical advice, and innovative ideas for communicating your message through print, design and typography, signage, apparel, variable data printing and direct mail, integrated marketing and environmental responsible printing. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!
Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
This is the first in a series of quick, explanatory posts about easy tricks in InDesign that could save time and the expense of prepress charges. First the tip… then some explanation if you want to read further.
To check for and remove unwanted color swatches in your file: click the upper right corner of the Swatches palette, and choose Select All Unused, then click the trash can to delete. If you have swatches left that you do not want in your file, some element within your document is using that color. Click on that swatch and try to delete it as well. If you have no embedded or linked files in your document that brought in that swatch, you will be prompted to change the color (which is being used somewhere in your document) to one of the remaining colors in your palette and problem solved! If the swatch is not able to be trashed, it has arrived in your palette from a “placed” item. You will have to go into that linked logo, artwork or photo in it’s native application to redefine the color to the one you need in your job. Once relinked, that swatch will be freed up to be deleted from your palette.
We see a lot of files with color conflicts come through the art department on their way from design to print. Many seemingly perfect files run into roadblocks at the prepress stage because of colorspace issues: unwanted spot colors, RGB to CMYK color shifts and so on. For the record, this is not a “beginner’s” stumbling block! The fact that files show up with serious color definition issues from seasoned and degreed designers as often as from busy small business owners just trying to save on desktop design expenses tells me that the color palette can be a tricky pitfall. But it need not be difficult if you know the final intent of your file and the color definitions that process will require. (If you are creating a file that will be repurposed for many uses, it is probably best to stay within the CMYK gamut with all elements of the file.)
The Swatches Palette Basics:
As a starting point, you will need a clear understanding of the RGB and CMYK color gamuts – if you need to, check out this link. Window–Color–Swatches will pull up your palette, and by default it is set to the CMYK gamut of colors. The first four in the list cannot be removed from the palette. They are:
None: a means of removing an assigned color from an object
Paper: a nonprinting preview of your page used to simulate the color of paper you will be printing on (usually set, by default, to white)
Black: pure 100% black with no other colors added (see other definitions and uses for black – there are many! – here)
Registration: defined as 100% cyan, 100%% magenta, 100% yellow and 100% black. It will show up on every separation when the file is output and is used to color necessary printing or guide marks such as crop marks, file information, registration bullets, etc..
Think of the other colors you see in this initial palette as a beginning sample of colors you can start playing with. They are all predefined as CMYK. Double-click any of them to tweak or completely redefine the color. You can define new colors by clicking the upper right corner of the palette and choosing from the drop down menu. From here, you can access the Pantone spot color libraries as well. Just remember, keep an eye on this palette as you work and maintain control over any colors that “show up” as you place linked objects into your document.
Spot Color vs. Process Color vs. RGB color
The icons next to your colors will go a long way in visually helping to keep control of the colors defined in your final files. The column on the right shows whether the swatch is defined as CMYK , RGB or even LAB. The column to the left of this will present a circle if the color is a spot color. Will you be printing with spot color inks? Offset in 4-color process? Digitally? Being aware of this as you work and place photos, logos, or other graphic elements into your InDesign file will allow you to see if what you are creating will separate correctly, if needed, at the print stage. While you can define and control the colors of any objects or type created within InDesign, once you place elements created in other applications into your document – such as eps or ai files from Illustrator or jpg and tif files from PhotoShop (or even the dreaded gif files stolen from a website!) – they may bring in predefined colors with them that you cannot override from the InDesign color palette.
If your intent is digital or CMYK process printing, often your printer can redefine spot colors from your pdf at the prepress stage. However, you may be charged extra for this file manipulation. If your intent is a two-color or spot color printing job, then having elements defined as CMYK, RGB, or with extraneous spot colors will render your file unprintable as desired. “Separating” the digital file into the correct plates to carry the spot inks your job requires will produce multiple unneeded plates. While your printer MAY be able to redefine or correctly designate these colors at this stage, chances are they will be calling you to either request the original root files (including all the fonts, links, etc.) or asking you to correct the color conflicts and resubmit your job all over again.
Rely on your printer for advice and direction with any questions you have in designing your marketing materials. They should be able to provide you with the latest information, technical advice, and innovative ideas for print, signage, apparel and integrated marketing. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!
Shop our full ImageSmith catalog online here. We can work with you to find the best option to suit your needs. Please note, prices in online catalog do not include decoration, but call us for a quote at 828.684.4512. 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.
Our prepress department sees a lot of files from a lot of sources. One of the most common confusions over a fairly simple issue concerns the inclusion of crop and bleed marks and defining the bleed and slug areas of a digital print file. While it’s usually an easy fix, you can save yourself time – and additional prepress charges – by working with a clear understanding of what those little marks mean, which to use and how important their position and function can be.
When you produce a pdf file from your page layout or design program such as InDesign in the Adobe Creative Suite, you will see options on how to control the bleed area and marks on your final file. If your file is to be used on a webpage or other digital output, you generally want the file to include no marks or bleed area, naturally. But for printing, either digital or offset, if any graphic elements extend to the edge of the finished piece, you must design them to continue off the “page” and then include an extra border area to accommodate some trim. Presses and digital printers cannot truly print all the way to the edge of a finished sheet reliably over a run; the piece must be printed on larger paper and then trimmed down for a good finished product. Understanding the following terms will make it clear which boxes you need to tic on the “Marks and Bleeds” window when creating your pdf.
Crop Marks: are small lines offset from the edge of the finished piece that instruct where to cut or trim the final page to a finished size. These will not appear on the finished piece. You definitely need to click these on. There will be some default settings that decide how these marks look… their stroke weight and offset distance. As a general rule, do not change these defaults unless you know a specific reason to do so. Adding crop marks at this stage WILL INCREASE the dimension of your pdf – ie, you have to have extra real estate on which to place the marks. It is helpful to stay aware of the final dimensions of your pdf.
Bleed Marks: They look just like crop marks, but instead of defining the finished cut size, they define the alloted bleed area of the document. The bleed area these marks define is itself part of the printed area. Note that just like adding crop marks, they increase the dimension of your eventual pdf even further, as it now must accommodate both the bleed area and the offset bleed marks. With each set of marks you add, the dimension of the pdf increases.
Registration Marks (and Color Bars): These sit outside the printed area and are used to correlate the different colors or plates used in offset lithography. Every type of printing uses a different, or many different, versions of the registration mark. This alone is a good reason not to add it on yourself when making the pdf. My advice is to not include these marks or color bars unless your print provider prefers that you do. Your service provider will add onto their press sheet the type of mark they need in the location they need it.
Bleed Area: the space you define outside the finished edge to hold the printed bleed. When you first set up your document, you can define the bleed area, but again when making the pdf you have the chance to either use or override that original definition. Many printers require at least 1/8 of an inch (.125″) minimum of ink coverage for a suitable bleed, however the defined bleed area itself can be wider. We always ask for 1/2 inch bleed area (not necessarily ink coverage, but area – meaning you do not have to fill this entire .5″ with color or images, these can stop at the 1/8″ minimum). The reason is this will accommodate the necessary bleed, the standard crop marks AND make the pdf size be a nice, easy-to-manipulate number. This can be a great time-saver. For example, a design that has an 8.5″ x 11″ finished size with .5″ bleed on all sides will create a pdf that is 9.5″ x 12″; where if you just let Acrobat put on crop marks and don’t specify a bleed area, it will render a file that is 9.08″ x 11.58″ – just enough to hold the crop marks, and to make your math difficult if you want to impose onto a larger size sheet for printing! Even worse, when creating a small size pdf such as an individual business card, and you add registration marks and page information, the resulting pdf will not only be an irregular size, it will also be off-center as it tries to make extra room at the bottom for the page info. Keep the math simple – add .5″ as a bleed area. It will hold all marks, information, and the bleed with room to spare.
Slug Area: Slug area is EVERYTHING outside the finished edge – this includes the defined bleed area and beyond. Crop marks and bleed area both live within the Slug area. You can define a larger slug area that will include the registration marks, color bars, and any other information you might want the printer to see, but that will be cut off from the finished piece. If you do not define a slug area, Acrobat will simply add on the space needed to hold the marks and instructions you have already specified, or it will use the bleed area you defined as your slug area.
Rely on your printer for advice and direction when creating your files. They should be able to provide you with everything from encouragement along the way to complete design, layout, copywriting, production, multi-purposing and distribution of your 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.
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.
Adobe Illustrator is a great tool for designing vehicle wraps, and with the help of Adobe PhotoShop you can achieve beautiful, high impact results. Perhaps the most important tip for the designer is to begin with an accurate template and work closely with your print provider to follow their required quidelines. Installation and print considerations can sometimes trump an interesting design idea when it comes down to the practicality of applying images on vinyl to metal. Below are 10 tips to bear in mind while working with wrap designs.
Credit – Advertising Agency: Bates Y&R, Copenhagen, Denmark. Creative Director: Ib Borup. Art Director: Peder Schack. Agency Producers: Josephine Winther-Poupinel, Steen Nøhr. Other credit: Erich Karsholt
Your design starts with an accurate template of your vehicle — they are available from the manufacturer or online and are essential for creation of your design at the correct size. Most templates come drawn at a scale of 1:20. Change the scale from 1:20 to 1:10 by selecting all and increasing the size by 200%. Now the scale is 1:10, where 1 inch onscreen equals 10 inches in real life. When the files are output, they are scaled at 1000%. It keeps the math simple.
Begin by setting up your template with the correct layers. One layer will need to include all the bumpers, windows and elements that allow you to view the design in a realistic way, but are really not needed for printing. This layer should be at the top of the Layers palette. You can keep it locked while you work. Create separate layers for each of the different views that will be printed out: passenger side, drivers side, front, back and top. On each layer you will need to place a copy of the vehicle outline of that view to clip the images/artwork placed there. Create a Clipping Layer (not just a clipping path). That way, all art placed on that layer will be clipped, regardless of its order in the palette. When it comes time for output the clipping mask can be turned off. Also, name each layer clearly. Keeping all of this organized is the key to creating usable files that your printer can use for output.
Keep in perspective how your wrapped vehicle will be seen – usually while in motion, or from a driver’s level view while sitting in traffic. Bolder colors and one main point of focus might work best to make your design eye-catching. Extensive text will probably not be very useful. By the way, if your vehicle has a sliding door, be sure any text or images don’t create an unexpected result when the door is open… you don’t want to be surprised by what might inadvertently be created!
Be careful of the corners! Bear in mind that your design has to be tiled into panels which are generally 52 inches wide, and your print provider or installer will need to discuss with you any concerns they have about how difficult the crossovers on these panels will be to line up during application. When you design a side view, it will have to connect with the front and back view. These “corners” will have to either match or have some allowance made for one image ending and the other beginning. If you can work in a solid color in these areas, or white space, it may prevent an awkward crossover in the finished product.
If you work with Photoshop to bring in image or pixel-based artwork for your wrap, be sure you are using a high resolution image. The preferred resolution for an image placed at 100% in this 1:10 scale is 720dpi – much higher than what is preferred for standard offset printing. The reason is that these files will be output at 1000%. File sizes will be large.
Some parts of your vehicle cannot be wrapped: state laws effect which windows can be covered with 50/50 window graphic material, and some plastic components will not allow the vinyl material to properly adhere. Consult the installer to find out these limitations, and to determine whether handles, chrome, and other decorative pieces can be removed, covered, or cut around.
Keep it simple. Overly complex designs will often defeat your purpose, both in being visually confusing and difficult to install. Car wraps have great proven recall rates, but too much information will work against a good impression.
Allow for at least 3 inches of bleed area outside the outline of the vehicle – that translates to .3 inches at the 1:10 scale you are working with. When in doubt, leave even more.
Avoid use of spot colors – go ahead and convert them to CMYK or RGB (whichever mode in which your provider suggests you work). The use of spot colors where any transparency is involved can result in some strange and unexpected results when printed.
Save a copy of your file to keep. Then turn all your fonts to outlines, save it as an eps and turn that in, along with ALL linked or placed image files, to your print provider.
Expect your printer to make some adjustments, with your approval, to your files in order to achieve the best results. It is also a good idea to doublecheck measurements between your digital template and the actual vehicle to avoid any costly mistakes. Designing “flat” artwork to fit over an irregular three dimensional object can be tricky, so work closely with your printer and installer to achieve the best possible outcome.
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.
