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TIPS
PLANNING -- PLANNING -- PLANNING!!:
- We can not stress proper planning enough. Know ahead of time what you are trying to accomplish and know how you wish to accomplish it. Use scans where scans are needed (usually only in photos or continuous tone art) and line art as logos and flat art.
- Always work with your printer at the inception of a project. Consulting a printer at the early part of a job will usually save you time, money & frustration.
- Most printers have a set of "standard" inks that they order premixed to PMS standard colors. Using one of these standards can save the cost of the printer having to mix inks to a precise formula to achieve an exact specified PMS color.
- Be aware of folding panels. Do your work at 100% the size of the printed piece and allow for proper margins where you want it to fold!
- Plan what program is best to accomplish your goal. QuarkXpress or Pagemaker are the programs best designed for page layout. Illustrator is great for line art, but is limited in page sizes. Freehand is usually best to overcome this page size limitation.
- Single page layouts should be built at trim size with bleeds.
- Resize ALL halftone and four color scans in PhotoShop or any other paint program. Resizing in the page programs or draw programs can lead to long imaging (RIP) time (and therefore cost more money). DO NOT compress the scans in PhotoShop! Export scans or graphics at the size they will print.
- When using colors, plan on what the colors will be and how they will print -- spot or process. If you use spot colors, specify colors in PMS (Pantone Matching System). If the colors are built out of process, please specify them as CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow & black) or Separations within the color pallet. A quick check to see how many plates (or negatives for making the plates) will be printed is to bring up the "Print" menu and select "Separations." The colors will be listed (note: "Registration" is NOT a true color or plate).
- The term "Gripper" refers to the space at the edge of the sheet where it is "gripped" and pulled through the press. This area is not printable and each press can have a different requirement on the amount of gripper it needs. Check with your printer to find out which press (and thus how much gripper to allow for in laying out your job. If you need to print within the gripper (or want to bleed an ink off the sheet) -- let the printer know. They will usually have to print on a larger sheet and then do a final trim to the desired finished size. This will cost more and can sometimes be avoided by changing your layout slightly during the planning stage.
- Prepare Text For Translation: If you're creating a publication that will be translated into another language, create a second black (spot color) called Text Black for your QuarkXPress or PageMaker color palette and apply that color, either manually or by including it in style sheets, to all text that will be translated. That way, the translators will only have to create one new set of film, which can be stripped together with the previous color separations for the new print run.
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