The following sponsored content is brought to you courtesy of Blurb®, a book-making platform and creative community that enables individuals to create, publish, share and sell high-quality photo books, trade books, magazines and ebooks. Blurb is one of PRINT’s trusted partners. by Jessica Ruscello at Blurb, Inc. Print design, itself, is an art form. Going from screen to page is a complex process where each step affects the final product—a product, with its full three dimensions, that is fundamentally different from what you’ve created on your 2D screen. We talked with print design experts and rounded up a few things they wish graphic designers knew as they were creating their projects. Things to Consider During DesignColor SpaceWhen you design in a digital space, your defaults are in RGB. This gives you hundreds of nuanced colors compared to what can be created with the chemistry of the four-color ink process of CMYK. When designing in RGB, remember to do soft proofing in CMYK to reveal what your designs look like with a more limited range, so you can adjust your expectations. It’s also a good idea to calibrate your monitor so that you see what the printer sees. Even though you can universally identify and communicate color values through something like the Pantone Matching System, getting a precise match for your colors will require adding a spot color to the CMYK process. To get precise colors, it’s common for those spot colors to appear in a 2-color setup for something like business cards, but adding your color to a complete range of tones means adding a 5th color as a special request with the printer, which can be expensive. When it comes to books, custom colors are only really possible with offset orders. DPI vs. PPIDigital designers are working in pixels, while printers are working in dots per inch. We’re typically working on high-end retina screens, and these behave very differently from paper. One of the most fundamental differences comes down to size and scale. In the print world, something isn’t 800 pixels wide; it’s 8 inches. Pixels or dots are a measurement of density, not scale. All kinds of things impact required density: What size is the product? How closely will it be viewed? What kind of detail is required for design integrity? 300 dpi is considered the basic standard for book printing, but if you were creating a billboard, you may need only 100 dpi because of how far away something is viewed. As a designer, this becomes most critical with image choice and file exporting. Make sure whatever you’ve included in your design looks good at the size it will be printed. An image with a dpi that’s too low will look terrible if it’s 2 inches on your screen but is expected to be 7–8 inches on the page of a book. When you’re designing the look, think about the actual scale and surface texture of the product you’re creating so you can be sure you’ve got the right size content that places nicely on your physical product. Designing for a Physical ObjectWe can’t say this enough. Remember that you’re designing for a physical object that has to be assembled. In the case of a book, lining up content at the gutter is very difficult. When you design on a screen, you’re designing on a flat surface, so it can be hard to foresee what you’ll lose to the folds of the page or the curves of the cover. Even if you’re working with bleed and trim guidelines from the printer, there’s still no perfect guarantee. As you create your layouts, don’t lose sight of the pages in a book. How will it look and feel in the actual hands of the viewer, who may not hold it perfectly flat? How can you account for the way the eye moves around a physical space? Top 5 Mistakes Designers Make in Print Files
The best thing to do is ask a lot of questions with your print specialists. It’s easy to forget just how technical and difficult it is to take something to print, because it’s gotten easier and easier for people to take their designs to print in the era of digital printing. It’s not just pushing a button, and with a little care, your piece can benefit from the art of great graphic design and the art of beautiful print design. The post Taking Your Design to Print: What You Need to Know appeared first on Print Magazine. via Tumblr Taking Your Design to Print: What You Need to Know
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Charles Gorton
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April 2020
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