press – ImageBlog

November 16, 2015

Print Surprise: Optical Illusions at the Press

Optical illusions – where the perceived reality of a viewed object is different than the actual physical attributes being viewed – are interesting phenomena. Occasionally an unintended illusion will pop up in the print work here at our shop, and it usually takes a little convincing to prove to our press operators and art department that the problem is in the viewing…not a mistake in the print files or print process itself.

Gradients Can Trick the Eye

Above is the press sheet layout for a 4-up printed card which will later be cut out and folded in half. However, coming off the press, the 4-up sheets appear like the left side is darker than the right, especially on the outer side of the card. (In person, the effect was even more dramatic than it shows up here onscreen as it was printing on a metallic paper.) We were stumped at first as to what could cause this – the pdf file was preflighted, all the images were rendering correctly. We wondered about a problem with the press, the imagesetter, the layers within the pdf file. Finally, it took cutting a finished sheet apart by the crop marks to see that once separated, the gradients looked fine. Placed next to each other, the light to dark gradient tricked the eye into thinking one side of the press sheet was darker.

Repeating Patterns and Distortion

The 2-up sheets printed above have a decorative border with a repeating pattern that flows in one direction to the halfway point and then reverses its orientation for the second half on all four sides. If you let your eye wander slowly along the borders, especially the longer vertical sides, it appears that the borders are bent and not a perfect square shape overall. The eagle eyes of our press operator noticed the subtle “bend” in the lines and decided that either the file or the imaging plate itself was somehow warped. Placing a ruler or straight edge on the press sheet reveals that, despite what your eyes are telling you, the line is perfectly straight across all four sides of the paper.

You can read more about optical illusions and view galleries of them at a surprisingly great number of websites as many people find the tricks our eyes can play on us to be a fascinating topic.

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.

June 4, 2015

“First Among Many”: Library of Congress Exhibit on Early American Printing

If you find yourself in Washington, DC this summer, the Library of Congress has a must-see, free public exhibit covering the foundation of printing in the American colonies. Called “First Among Many: The Bay Psalm Book and Early Moments in American Printing,” the exhibit will run from June 4, 2015 to January 2, 2016. The LoC press release says the amazing collection of printed papers will:

“…tell the story of early printing in the American colonies, spanning 100 years, as printing evolved from a colonial necessity to the clarion of freedom.”

The centerpiece of the exhibit is two copies of the Bay Psalm Book of 1640. Only 11 copies are known to exist, and the book is both the first English-language book in North America and the first printed book of American poetry. It is also the most expensive printed book ever – having sold at Sotheby’s for $14,165,000 to entrepreneur and philanthropist David Rubenstein in 2013.

You can peruse the Bay Psalm Book online for free (see below), courtesy of the Old South Church in Boston – but nothing tops the ability to see the actual printed work in person this year at the Library of Congress.

Other rare printed items from the colonial period will also be on exhibit:

A Poor Richard’s Almanac by Ben Franklin from the 1740s
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense pamphlet from 1776
The Federalist essays of 1788 from Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay
Poet Phillis Wheatley’s 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Wheatley was the first African American published poet and the first published African American woman
An Algonquian Indian Bible from 1663
The first novel ever printed in the colonies: The Power of Sympathy, 1789 by William Hill Brown

For those unable to get to DC, the Library of Congress will also maintain an online version – here. This exhibit truly highlights the role printing played in America’s founding and independence. That influence continues today as print evolves through an ongoing information and technological revolution. Print is communication – it will change, but never be relegated to just a museum exhibit.

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 & 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.

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.

April 25, 2014February 15, 2023

Retro Gizmo: Artifacts from the Pre-Digital PrePress Department

Last year we featured a blogpost on an antique piece of bindery equipment still being used in our print shop. Today, we’re thinking about a few other vintage relics that have been gathering dust in the art department. The pre-digital days in prepress were not all that long ago – extending into the 1990s. The print industry was an early adopter of computer technology with digital imaging technologies, workflow and of course design software from the early days of Adobe, Quark, Corel, Aldus and others. Early Macs were the industry leader in digital typesetting, page layout and graphics. Both the design process and the photographic techniques used to image plates for offset printing underwent a rapid transition just before the new millennium.

The 90s saw the tail end of prepress imaging techniques that had evolved over decades. Design skills included “paste-up” – manually positioning type and graphics onto each master sheet for printing. You’ll really appreciate a straight tool line once you paste on a piece of tool-line tape by hand! For graphic elements and photographs, anything other than 100% black had to be rasterized by imagesetters into “dots” to create grayscale halftones. Full color printing required four separate pieces of developed film, “stripped” into exact position with a hand-trimmed mask. Large print shops had many full-time employees whose job was to “strip” plates for the press, usually at light tables like the one seen at the top of this post. Below are some relics from those days when graphic design was as much craft as art:

Scale for enlargements — Resizing graphics and text was often done photographically before desktop publishing – requiring some math skills for percentages of enlargement or reduction. This handy tool was invaluable.

Pre-Digital Artroom Supplies — Paste-up: manually creating a master of the printed page. Red Litho Tape was used to block any light shining through a stripping sheet. “Cold Type” supplies included decorative tool lines in the form of tape. E-rulers were handy for measuring point size of imaged type.

Art Room Supplies — Strippers were small metal tabs used to keep film in perfect alignment for processing plates. It was also the name for the folks who handled that entire process. The orange sheet here is a stripping sheet, where printable areas would be opened up (masked) to allow photographic imaging of the press plates.

T-Square and grayscale or color targets — Manual skills and a steady hand were essential skills for paste-up. The T-square and other tools helped. Also, much of the imaging process relied on traditional photographic techniques to achieve proper color and grayscale output.

The skill and craft of fine printing and effective marketing is more alive today in the digital world than ever before. 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.