Print Design TipsTips and Information About Printing

You’re planning as to how your Business Marketing Budget should be most wisely used, and inevitably this will include printing costs! Whether you decide to produce a glossy catalog depicting and describing your product in great detail, or a flyer merely listing the services your company offers, you will need to undertake a little research to locate the printing company that best caters for your requirements. 

The most expensive mass-mailing production is the catalog. The advantage of this choice is that your catalog is like supplying a portable, unobtrusive salesman who can enter your potential client’s business premises or home for them to refer to at their leisure.  The content must be dynamic; your product must be enhanced by the design elements and color, not competing with them.  Avoid overwhelming your customer with lengthy descriptions; condense your text to descriptions that hold their interest.  Arrangement of your products is important, place popular and lower priced articles to the front, graduating to the more expensive, superior items.  You may consider using speciality products on the outside covers.

Color leaflets depicting a sample from each of your product ranges are a much less expensive alternative to a catalog.  You can more afford the risk of a percentage of potential clients never doing more than putting it through the shredder!!  The same options are offered by the print company as with the catolog but pay special detail to the color and limited space for description detail.

At the lower end of the price spectrum is the ‘Flyer’ a single, usually two-color information sheet.  The limited space available for artwork and description of your company and product can be compensated by clever design and vibrant coloring.

Which ever option you choose for your company marketing campaign, it is essential that careful checking of all details be made prior to printing.  It is a good idea if the editing is carried out by two different people to double the opportunity to correct any errors that one person may miss!!

Color is basic and yet so powerful in its effect on our senses while providing deep rooted emotional responses; this makes your use of color absolutely vital when it comes to presenting your ideas to the world.

A simple absence of color can convey a lack of emotion, a professional aura, prudent and sober decision making.

A presence of color can convey bright ideas, shock and taste, happy go lucky approach, friendly and easy to deal with attitude and much more.

The use of color or its absence is intrinsic to the success of your brochure, newsletter, direct mailing or sales flyer and cannot be ignored so let’s look at teh basics with color without blowing your budget in the process.

There are two ways color is used: spot color printing and four-color process.

The Four Color-Process uses a combination of four colors to produce the actual colors you will see on your finished product.

Spot Color Printing uses different color inks applied as required to produce the finished product.

You will need to be familiar with terms such as grayscales, screens and halftones along with CMYK, RGB and PS to understand how color is working with your printing projects.

CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black – this refers to the four inks used in the 4-color process and from these colors are produced the rest as required.

RGB stands for Red, Green, Blue and is used on monitors (computer screens) and televisions to produce color – this is important to know as you will be scanning pictures in RGB (to produce the best monitor reproduction) but the actual finished product needs to be printed as CMYK files to ensure maximum quality in reproduction.

PMS stands for Pantone Matching System and is used in the spot color inking process with a computer design package having literally thousands of Pantone color schemes for you to use in creating your design and ultimately finished product.  Use swatches when selecting colors because on the computer screen they will always appear brighter to your naked eye due to the back illumiination of the monitor screen but this will not be available in the finished product which will appear duller in comparison.

Many printers and designers belive the design is the key to a good piece of printed media, however, this is not the case for many readers looking to find your message within the content – design is critical and the visual impact and style play a great deal in the success of your material but ultimately, do you wish to produce art or send a message that your target market will easily see, read and understand?

A sound principle is to place content first  and design second – assuming you are following this, let’s now concentrate on some design issues.

Inversion Impact

When you read a headline of a newspaper, you will frequently find it has been inverted, that is the headline is in white against a solid, black background.  This leads to a greater visual impact than simply printing teh headline in, say, larger typeface.

This can also be used for grapic imagery and photographs may be particularly effective but you need the help of a skilled designer to garner the most out of such complex imagery.

Less is More

Buy no means are we advocating the minimalist approach but if yiou are trying to pack as much content into one page or one document, you are going to overload your readers.  Marketing and company brochures in particular are prone to this common error and it pays for you to take a huge step back and look at what truly is vitally crucial for your readers to understand and cut out the extraneous pieces of content you are stuffing in.

Work with the Grid

The grid is a design technique for arranging layout and especially for simpler pieces it is best to “Stick with the Grid!”

You don’t need to strictly follow the grid and settle for the staid 3 column layout; try experimenting with different combinations and personally I find the 7-column setup expands the possibilities enormously with sidebars, 2-column overlaps and so on.