Graphic Design 101
Saturday 12 May 2007Again, it’s been a little longer than I would have liked since my last post, however things have been rather busy in the studio lately. My new family and I were cotemplating a move out of town, however, decided otherwise. I’ve also been working on a quite a number of projects. Since my last posting, I’ve left my day job and am now pursuing studio work full-time.
Running from meeting to meeting, doing a good deal more self-promotion and sales work has cut into my computer time, but it’s time I get back on the bloggin’ wagon and update the rest of my site as well.
Though I try to provide a good mix of advanced marketing and design tips, it never hurts to go back to your basics and remember the fundamentals. So this installment is all about the things we should know when beginning a design project, but may have forgotten after getting in our daily routines…
Know Your Colorspace
An oversight here can easily ruin any print project, or cause a web projects colors to look funny. Always work in CMYK for print projects and RGB for web work. For photography work that’s going to press, I’ve found it’s best to make the CMYK conversion after doing any image manipulation or color correction. For fine art reproduction, talk to your printer first, some printers prefer to do the conversion themselves.
Resolution, Resolution, Resolution
Just like the relevance of the three “L’s” of real estate establish property value, resolution determines the quality of your reproductions. When starting any project, know it’s final output and set your resolution accordingly. This is primarily in relation to working in Photoshop. If you’re producing a graphic that is to be used in a print project, 300 dpi is generally the minimum resolution you’d want to use. Once again though, it’s never a bad idea to check with the company that going to be doing the printing for you. For example, newsprint generally prints at a resolution of 150 dpi because the paper that’s used in newsprint won’t hold an image much clearer than that, at the opposite end of the spectrum, some fine art publications request resolutions as high as 600 dpi. There are also some oddball requests out there as well. One printer I work with for glicée work requires 302.6 dpi resolution. Why? I have no clue, but just goes to show, when in doubt, ask your output provider what they prefer. It’ll save you money and headaches in the long run.
Use the right Program
Simple. Use a photo editing program such as Photoshop for editing pictures. Use a page layout program like InDesign for publication layouts. Each program is catered to a certain type of work. Sure, you can lay out a brochure in Photoshop, but that’s not what the program was designed for and as such, you’ll be causing yourself to do more work to get the project done than if you did it in a page layout application such as Quark or InDesign. The same goes for logo work, this is Illustrator’s forté, not Photoshop’s. I’m always amazed at what designers try to do in Photoshop when it’s clearly not what the application was designed for.
Remember the Bleeds!
If your document has color that is supposed to run to the edge of the finished sheet, you need to make your artwork bigger than the actual finished size. For example, if you’re creating an 11 x 8.5″ trifold brochure that has a graphic taking up the entire background, your artwork should be 11.25 x 8.75″. The reasoning for this is that your printer will be printing your brochure on a piece of paper larger than 11 x 8.5″ and then cutting it down to size. The .25″ allowance is called a bleed and ensures that should the paper shift during the cutting process, there will be no white fringe at the edge of the paper.
Preflight, Package, Send
Probably the biggest faux pas I’ve seen from a disappointly large number of designers is submitting artwork without preflighting. All page layout programs worth having include a Preflight tool. Preflighting simply checks your document to make sure you’ve got all your art in the right colorspace, resolution, all fonts are either embedded or available for packaging (not copyright protected) and all links are up to date. Running a preflight on your document will instantly tell you if there are any problems with your files and what you need to do to fix them. Again, saving you time, money and headaches with your output provider. Packaging is done after preflighting. Packaging your document places a copy of your working page layout file, all included fonts and graphics as well as a .txt file containing any special instructions and your contact information in one folder. Essentially creating a copy of all your working documents in one location for you to stuff (or zip, depending on your platform preference) and send to your output provider.It may seem elementary to the seasoned professional, but in my experience working with other designers and marketers, these are the steps most often overlooked in many, many projects.
chris | Design, Print, Website Dev
