The "Do's & Don'ts" of prepress and design

• Download free fonts from the 'net.
• Use Flash and Imageready to create images for print, they are web app's
• Lay everything out in Illustrator or Freehand, they are for making logos and design elements
• Use Powerpoint files
• Supply graphics in RGB unless you have a strong understanding of colour management
• Create anything @ 72 dpi
• Save anything as flattened jpegs or web pdfs
• Use rgb swatches
• Think that RGB 256,256,256 equals solid black
• Use system fonts for design work
• Use Microsoft Publisher for high end print
• Rasterise your text in Photoshop
• Use 16 bit RGB, it doesn't make any practical improvement in print
• Think that printed colours can actually match a tranny, densities achievable on paper are far less than those you get in trannies
• Choose colours that go all the way to 400% total ink for a nice strong black, aim for about 320-340 tops
• Lock your files
• Believe everything you read on the net (except here!)

Do -

• Use Adobe Indesign or Quark for the layout
• Use Illustrator, Freehand and/or Photoshop for the graphics
• Have colour management turned on
• Learn what resolution means
• Export to PDF X1/a
• Learn what 'rich black' means
• Use the 'Package' function
• Proofread your text before submitting to printer
• Add bleeds
• Learn the difference between spot and process
• 'Embed colour profile' when saving
• Create books with page count in multiples of 4 or 8
• Double the margins between the columns of your brochure
• Scale your images close to printed size at 300dpi (an A4 pic should be no more than 30 Meg)

The printing industry is one of the oldest, most developed and competitive industries of the Industrial Revolution.

There are easy ways to print and there are hard ways and as printers, we certainly prefer the easy way and we are more than happy to help you travel the easy road with us but you will need to let us help you. A printing job is a team effort between the originator and the manufacturer.

Printing is defined by very specific but achieveable standard procedures. Some print shops carry them through to the letter and some work to a more relaxed expectation. You can decide where you fit in this regime and your results will match in quality and price.

You don't need to 'drive' the process, hop on board and let us take you where you want to go. If we help you look good, then we look good.....WIN/WIN situation.

Printing should not be a roller-coaster ride! We want to work with you.

You can print in full colour process, spot colours or a combination of both, but make sure you know which when you start.

Use the appropriate swatchbooks; many spot colours appear desaturated when reproduced as process colour.

THE DIFFERENCE:

Spot colours come premixed in a tin or are custom mixed by our press operators from industry standard inks, like mixing paints. If you specify a PMS colour, we will mix the ink and it will match the industry standard on a 'standard' paper stock. Bear in mind that swatches are on a certain stock and your chosen paper stock may have a different hue which could affect the final appearance.

Please see our Colour Primer for more detail.

~Sytem fonts
~Freebie web fonts
~Menu Bolding/Italic

~Why doesn't my font work correctly?

• Modern design fonts are cross platform compatible.

• Freebie fonts from the web are often corrupt, stolen, missing characters or just bad....
Your layout application probably came with a built-in set of designer fonts, use them.

• System fonts: Often don't have enough information in them to function properly in a design environment. Avoid 'city' fonts such as Geneva, Monaco, Chicago etc. (see Menu Bolding, below)

• "Menu bolding" This term refers to what happens when you are typing in a particular font and you hit the 'B' for bolding button or the 'I' for italic button......

It does not do the correct (for printers and designers) function. It applies a fattening effect for bold and a slope effect to simulate italic. Proper design fonts have a plain or roman version, an italic version and a bold version at least. Each of these is actually another font which is gathered with the parent font in a 'family'. They can be accessed by going to the font menu and choosing the appropriate family member by name such as 'Garamond Italic'.

Sometimes a 'bold' button will grab a family member and substitute somewhat randomly...such as bolding a futura, which might result in a futura bold or a futura demi or a semi! Sadly, the bold button is not psychic and can't choose the correct font variant each time. It is a hangover from when software was simpler. The other reason for its existence is that most applications dont really care what a font looks like, if the user bolds something, just make it thicker, and besides there is only one member in the chicago system font, there's not even a bold to choose!

As alluded to earlier, there are many levels of layout application, not all of which are appropriate in a commercial print/design environment.

Microsoft is not a Publishing/Printing/Design player. Products such as Word and Publisher are designed for in-house desktop publishing and lack the power and sophistication required in our industry.

The problem with them is that they are dynamic, line breaks change, margins change, images move about to suit that office printer environment and that is fatal to a commercial print job.

Those applications also lack colour management (most convert to rgb on the trot) and menu bolding etc is rife.

The current industry favourite is Adobe's Creative Suite, comprising InDesign to lay out your document, Photoshop to work up your photos to perfection, and Illustrator to create superb vector elements. I am unashamedly biased here, but Adobe is light-years ahead of the opposition in this field and at a little over $1000 AU the Creative Suite is the bees-knees.

Creative Suite also includes Adobe Acrobat which complements a PDF workflow beautifully and helps to integrate web design along with Imageready and Go-Live.

The BIG one!

Colour management...

In the past, colour was colour; the process equivalent of Reflex Blue was 100%cyan, 72%magenta, 0%Yellow and 6% black, and those were the dot values that went to press...

Today, that is no longer the case.

Despite what some people will tell you, colour management is here to stay. Those cmyk values are the starting point and will be changed in the workflow to suit the specific printing environment in which the job is being produced. The values are adjusted to allow for different halftone dot formations, different stock colours, different ink brands and primarily, the characteristics of the printing device being use to reproduce the job.

Here is a big truth.....Turning off colour management does not stop things going wrong!

You might have had a printer (or photographer even) tell you that if you don't understand colour management, you are better off turning it off. This is a huge cop-out. Adobe, one of the major forces in colour management has contributed to this myth by allowing user to turn off colour management in their applications. They should have called it 'defer colour management' because that is all you can do.....sooner or later, your job will be colour managed and the result can only be RANDOM colour management.

(Note: spot colour printing does not utilise colour management for platemaking, but it does for converting to 4-colour process or displaying on screen.)

Bottom line - any serious designer needs to understand and use colour management, otherwise their control of colour will be more by luck than actual control.

Please visit our Colour Management Primer.