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.

In the last post we started discussing color and the different ways in which it can be used but we also touched on some terminology such as grayscales and halftones which we shall clarify here for you today.

A black and white photograph is probably the best example we can give you of what a grayscale actually is – the picture is made up of differing shades of gray between black and white and the differences create the picture reproduction you actually hold in your hand.

The grayscale has an absolute black, an absolute white and between there are 254 differing shades of gray – this is 256 “colors” in total or in computer tekkie parlance is 8-bits of information.  

An image is only grayscale if it is made up of differing shades of gray; another way to make an image is using absolute black and white lines to create the effect of differing shades making up the image – in this case it is known as a bitmap and not a grayscale.

The difference is important when it comes to the printing process because you can scan an image as grayscale or bitmap – scanning a grayscale image as a bitmap will render all the information contained within it that is no absolute black or white meaningless i.e. not reproduced and you lose the detail.  Perform this in reverse and you get a blurred image i.e. scan a bitmap image using grayscale.

Screens and Halftones

A screen is what is applied to a photographic image which gives the impression another color has been used or is present when it was not at the time the photo was taken.

Using screens or halftones, you can convey a lighter image effect or a change in the color tone itself and they come in a wide variety of strengths so you can play around with your final image result and all you are using is one ink which reduces the cost to you with your final product.

Herein lies the key – using a lower number of inks allows for cheaper cost and this is where screens come in handy for you as the buyer as well as helping create a better image for the reader and enduser.

Designing your printed materials is something we all must face sooner or later, but whether you are experienced with the process or a first-timer, the results are truly only limited by your imagination and the ability of your printer to render the imagery created.

This is one area where good communications with your printer are essential as there will be some things that to you as the customer may seem a little off the wall and “out there” but to him are pretty straight-forward pieces to create.

To get your creative juices flowing and hopefully help you with your next meeting with your print partners, here’s a few hints and tips for you to use.

Think Outside the Paper

The mind works in funny ways sometimes and one of the quirks you can capitalize on is the m nd w ll f ll  n th  bla ks.

You can use this to your advantage when designing your marketing media so when you are looking at layout, don’t focus simply on what will fit in the space – use the borders too and don’t worry about overlapping the edges.

Paper Standards

Depending on the purpose of the printed communication you are likely to use the established paper sizes bu, there are times when you shouldn’t and there is no reason why you have to follow them religiously.

If you are looking to get your brochure noticed, use a non-standard size so it doesn’t fit precisely into a neat pile of letters and other documents – make sure it overhangs or peeks out of a stack of papers and this will help get it noticed in the sea of junk that everyone accumulates.

Content is King

Foxus on the content – this is where your message is contained and not within the imagery – don’t let design take over your project, it is important but remember people read so focus on that first and make teh design revolve around the content.