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.
Our newly wrapped Zebra delivery van hit the road this week. Look for it all over Asheville, Hendersonville and Western North Carolina. Marty, our zebra mascot, is watching from the back door.
Marketing Your Company with Vinyl Wraps
If you’d like tips on the incredible things you can create with vinyl vehicle wraps, check out our blog post. You can also wrap boats, motorcycles, equipment, trailers… pretty much anything you want to turn into a mobile billboard. The wraps hold vibrant colors, are all weather proof, and removable without damaging the finish of your property.
Look for Marty on the road! Earning our stripes… every day.
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 technology – the instantaneous flow of information and data, the interconnectedness of people who would never otherwise meet, the crowd-sourcing of digital solutions. In our line of work, we have marveled at the seismic shift in the ease and innovation of creating graphics and images, the global opportunities that opened when file transfers and commerce moved online, and the digital transition from plates and darkroom photo processing to computerized pdf workflows. It all makes for an exciting age in which to live. Technology has quickly, and not always painlessly, transformed the print industry from one about ink and paper into one of interactive communication, new media and data interpretation. And yet…. there’s just something about paper.
At the heart of this human love for paper is the physical, solid, stackable nature of the thing. It is organic. It has weight. You can hold it in your hand and point to the truth – “See? It’s right there in black and white.” Or color. Whether it is centuries of reliance on the physicality of having the “written word” in your hand, or whether it is something more primal, paper and printing hold a powerful place in our psyche. Think about it: your birth certificate, your child’s first crayon drawings from school, report cards, your ticket stub from a favorite concert, a treasured valentine or love letter, a “welcome home” sign, a sketch of a great idea, an autograph of your hero. At all the important, memorable moments of your life, paper has played a central role. It is usually the means by which you remember and treasure those events – unplugged.
Today, technology is clearly altering some of that relationship. The recent bankruptcy of Kodak seems to many of us who grew up in the last half of the twentieth century to be unthinkable. Yet they have announced they are going out of the film business. The woes of the USPS are a result of email and digital communications usurping the role of snail mail. Newpapers and magazines are struggling with the transition from paper to online versions. But paper still carries the word and image of our culture in ways that electronic media is not yet able to – by its very physical nature and our historic appreciation for its reliable, tactile properties. It is still capable of putting your message right into someone’s hands regardless of internet providers or the accessibility of a wifi signal.
Still not convinced? Watch this great video from Domtar’s “Paper because…” initiative that spotlights the contradiction between students who at first say they want to live in a paperless world – until they are told their diplomas will be handed out in pdf format.
An electronic diploma would convince most all students that paper has a clear place in our lives and futures. Maybe the tech future will gradually change this romantic attachment we have to the beauty and functionality of paper, but I doubt it will erase it anytime soon.
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.
Running a small business demands expertise in many, many divergent fields. You must excel at finance, employee relations, marketing, sales, and of course the specifics of the type of business you went into in the first place. In a large corporation, each duty or specialty is handled by an expert in that profession – or an entire heirarchy of experts: production, sales, marketing, human resources, R & D. As a small business owner, that’s all on you. Technology is only making that landscape even more challenging, daily.
To bring in help or advice on any of these areas is costly and risky. When it comes to marketing, however, your best resource is right at hand. And – this is by far the best part – it is FREE! If you have the right printer, you already have a highly trained marketing consultant who knows print, branding, direct mail, web strategies, social media and has years of experience in both high and low tech marketing approaches that work for businesses just like yours. The most assuring part of this partnership for you is that the print/communications company only succeeds when your marketing succeeds! Start taking advantage of this asset – the print industry itself has had to reinvent itself in this new high tech economy. They know what works.
Even if you have a background in marketing, the rules of the game over the past 10 years have changed DRASTICALLY. (Check out this amazing and exhaustive infographic on the History of Marketing.) The marketing success that got you and your small business to where it is today will most likely not take you to future success in the emerging economy and IT world. Do you have the time and resources to become an expert in web design, SEO (search engine optimization), interactive online marketing, web metrics or analytics, to position your operation to embrace the new and as yet unknown technoligies that are right over the horizon? In most cases, the answer is no – and unless your business IS marketing, you should not have to. Turn to your printer for help.
The term “printer” is misleading. Today, printers do far more than put ink on paper. They have become marketing and communications specialists, and they are your closest and most knowledgeable sources for consulting with you on your overall marketing strategy. A good printer will understand your budget, your marketing goals and be able to suggest many options 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, who your consumer is, what your mission and specific goals are for the year. These are the facts your sales rep needs to recommend specific marketing strategies that you can use to translate into profit and customer recognition of your brand and your work. So the question is: 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?
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.
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 first steps in learning Adobe Creative Suite’s PhotoShop are always exploring the tool bar and scanning through the drop down menus. But if you use PhotoShop with any regularity, you soon discover common tasks you are performing over and over with each image, and the repetition of those ‘click patterns’ can quickly become tedious. By learning and using even a few keyboard shortcuts you will be amazed at the speed with which you can accomplish your edits.
Everyone develops their own signature style and knowledge base in using PhotoShop, and we all settle on our own set of keyboard shortcuts that become second nature. For anyone new to PhotoShop, experiment with some of the most common. Many simple tasks, such as switching tools, can be accessed just by hitting a letter. The shortcuts are often obvious, some a little less so. You can hover over the tool icon on the tool palette and PhotoShop will tell you both the name of the tool and its keyboard shortcut in parentheses:
M = Marquee
C = Crop
L = Lasso
B = Brush
E = Eraser
P = Pen
W = Magic Wand
V = Move
A = Direct Selection
I = Eyedropper
U = Rounded Rectangle
R = Rotate View
Common actions for editing that become very useful to know as a shortcut include:
Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) duplicates the pixels you have selected to their own new layer.
Option-Delete (PC: Alt-Backspace) fill with foreground color
Command-Delete (PC: Ctrl-Backspace) fill with background color
Command-L brings up the Levels dialogue box
Command-M brings up the Curves dialogue box
Command-F5 brings up the Fill dialogue box
To move around quickly without changing tools on the toolbar, press and hold the Space Bar to temporarily activate the hand tool. To zoom in or out without the magnifying glass, try Command-+ or Command-– (PC: Crol-+ and Ctrl-–). To fit everything on screen, use Command-0.
Most shortcuts are listed under the drop down menus, or can be found in PhotoShop Help. To be honest, I stumble across most of them by accident – bumping the wrong key and wondering “Now how did that happen?” No harm done in fumbling around and finding out for yourself! Make friends with the shortcuts, and don’t feel pressure to learn them all (no one actually does that, do they?). Learn the ones that save you the most aggravation.
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.
Tangible, portable, engaging, accessible, user-friendly, multiuse, renewable, versatile and creative… all great reasons to make print the foundation of your marketing campaign. Its very nature as a physical, rather than digital, object makes it effective and respected in the consumer’s mind. With advances in digital printing, the cost of print is even more affordable than ever for short or long runs. But by combining print with the new tools available online for personalized, trackable, interactive communication, you can boost your ROI with a truly integrated marketing campaign.
Print is user-friendly. All market segments feel comfortable viewing and reading information in print — therefore it can be used to lead those who are reticent about online purchasing or digital communications to check out your webpage, ‘click’ and follow a QR code, or visit their own personalized landing page (PURLs). Print is an easy stepping stone that works in coordination with online marketing to guide interested customers into a more interactive realm of communication and commerce. At the same time, print will reinforce your brand and online message in a concrete way.
With variable data printing (VDP), print is more user-friendly than ever. It speaks to each recipient in your database individually. From the printed contact, lead them to respond with more information about themselves and their interests, either online or by mail. With that information you have enriched your database and can target each customer in an even more personal way — trackable, multitouch, measurable results from your marketing dollars.
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.
