Questions about PRINTING, FONTS, GRAPHIC DESIGN go here

I will start.

I am looking into the possibility of doing a small run (say 30 editions) of a 20-page zine/catalogue/booklet and am wondering how is the quickest and cheapest way to go about this. I know there are sites like LULU and BLURB where one can do this online. Is this the best way to go or should I be looking for a small local press? Anyone who has had experience with small print publications, I would love to hear from you!

Kinko's?

Is that the best?

I want something that is as cheap as possible, but still looks good, desirable. I will be doing all the layout, etc. and have never done anything like this before. And I have only a few weeks to get it done, haha.

What are you selling in the catalogue?

It's for an art show, so we're not really selling anything.

not sure where you live, but www.inkerlinker.com/ is a great resource for printers.

I am in Los Angeles, on the East side.

ah ok. I'm NYC based, so I'm not as familiar with West Coast. You can try Inker Linker for LA shops ( http://www.inkerlinker.com/by-location/ )

I usually just go to print shops in the area vs online. Although UPrinting.com did my business cards for me - I did a promotion through them so they were cheap, but came out pretty great quality. They usually have some sort of promotion going on.

Also...totally rudimentary question...when you send these places a file (I'm guessing a PDF?), what is the easiest way to create such a thing? Photoshop/Illustrator? This would be text + graphics + photos.

Also totally flummoxed by the whole 300 DPI thing when dealing with stills captured from video...

Use Photoshop to create the image and Illustrator for layout and to create the PDF/EPS files.

Never, ever used Illustrator in my life.

This seems simple though, no?
http://www.blurb.com/create/book/end_download

You can create text in Illustrator? And import from like a word file or something?

I would just paste the text in and arrange it around the image(s).

Or you could just do it in word and PDF it if it's mostly text and a very small amount of image.

probably not going to help in to throw dissenting, not particularly researched opinions into the mix, here, but from limited personal experience i'd vote for InDesign over Illustrator, here; i just find it very easy & kinda made for making a book or laying out preexisting objects on a page in a way that i didn't quite get w/Illustrator. all of this providing you have access to either/both, obv

multiple dpis can be confusing, though i think the act of exporting what you've made into a PDF will cap the DPI of the whole thing, so you don't really need to worry about it once you've placed your still.

did you see the deets about the zine that grady made, admrl? if he is around maybe he can offer experience, it looked pretty rad & was iirc made at kinkos

InDesign is definitely better for this sort of thing than Illustrator.

You really need to use a page-design program like InDesign or QuarkXPress, or leave it to someone who does. Photoshop is a pixel-based image editing program; Illustrator is an object-based image editing program. Both could technically be used for page layout, but it's like using a paintbrush to eat peas or using your fingers to butter your bread.

I have CS5.1 so am assuming I do have all of this stuff. Where is Grady's zine? Maybe I will use Kinko's but those places drive me nuts. If the price is right, though...

xp - yes, OK. I don't really have the time or resources to find someone to do this stuff for me this time around, though maybe next time if it works out. So this has to be something I can do more or less myself.

Am prepared to spend an entire day doing Linda Tutorials on InDesign if necessary

i am not great with this kinda thing but have found indesign real easy; there are afaic two things you need to know to do most of the basic stuff: that if you want to place anything on a page, you have to draw a box for it, first; & that you need to learn the distinction between the two cursors (one black, one white), in selecting objects, for when you want to colour them or transform them or whatever, as they both have slightly different purposes. if you just want to place text and images on a page and fuck with typefaces & export to pdfs, it should be straightforward, hopefully, and i think it's set-up so you can be designing like 'a book', though i've only ever designed a page or a poster or w/e.

there's also this thread for indesign q&a stuff: t/s: Quark v. InDesign

this might be an obvious thing, but at some point, maybe once you've worked out how you're printing it, it might be worth checking in about deadlines etc - it's perhaps not such a big thing with such a small run, but it's good to know when you need to have something done by to take into account drying times, other people's jobs, etc.

I'm nervous about doing this, but I need feedback on a thing. I AM NOT A DESIGNER and I don't have a good image editor, I had to use Pixelmator and the options in it are limited. Also this is a draft, not a final. Uhhhh...comments? Advice?

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e66/LimitedLiabilityGirl/NYCD_class_flyer_zps4a88c550.jpg

The story is that my dance group doesn't have a single designer or web person associated with it, and we don't have any money to hire one, so all our materials invariably look like someone's mom made them out of clip art in 1998. It's embarrassing. I offered to make us a new...I don't know what you call it, a flyer that will prob only be used online? I don't rly expect to print this (ironically that's the part I could actually do).

This already looks massively better than mom's clip art effort!

One thing strikes me so far is where the infobox is: it's overlaid on some other stuff and it's very close to the edges of the page. I'd be tempted to try it in the bottom left — there's a big empty space there, and it's where all the people are facing, so the reader's eye will go to it after passing over the dancers.

To avoid it being too close to the edge, line its left edge up with the "N" of "New York". I'd also think about playing with the text inside that box — it's a little bit lost. You could either shrink the box if you think the text is the right size, or blow the text up more. (It's worth using bold with white-on-black text, too).

Omg thank you so much, stet. So the info box is there to hide the ugly/pointless blue "YOU ARE HERE" sign behind it, which I wished wasn't in our shot. Is it not really working? Point taken about ppl looking to the bottom left so maybe it's where the info has to go.

We have an official logo that I was saving the bottom left for but I'll play with it and see.

I wanted the red boxes to be angled on the same line as the dock edge, and to be separated and have "banner" ends and not obscure that ship's mast between them but Pixelmator thwarted me.

Would the logo work over the YOU ARE HERE? If it's not big enough, clone out the bits that still show? Haven't used Pixelmator, but guessing it has some kind of clone stamp tool.

It does, yeah. I'll just have to figure out how to use it....

I hope the logo will be edit-able so I can resize and maybe change the color of it or whatever, the person who created it knows even less about graphics than I do. Clearly we're a talented bunch! Ty ty ty.

Anyone else?

I like having the info box at the bottom right - the red from the top banner, the ship, and "$14" are distributed evenly. I fear that if it's moved to the bottom-left corner, it'll crowd the perspective sight lines from the pier's planks that naturally draw your attention to the three dancers.

Before changing the size/weight of the info text, reduce the width of the white outline around the box and try putting the name/address on two lines.

I took stet's advice but the info didn't fit on the left--it crowded the dancer. So I had to move it back but I did give it more space on the side and more weight/size in the type and played around and came up with this:

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e66/LimitedLiabilityGirl/NYCD_flyer3_zps3e60c576.jpg

This is at least respectable, right? We can put this out and not have to apologize for it?

Not that one HAS to apologize for anything, but it's not, like, aesthetically embarrassing?

i like how the red and white match the ship.
something about "beginner class" weirds me out though.

I'll look at the sizes and fonts when I get back!

oh i don't mean the design! just the phrase, "beginner class"
it looks great -- thumbs up!

Oh, heh, I can't change that, it's actually the name of the class.

Thanks, you guys! I feel good about this thing, I know it's nothing special but I was starting from scratch and it took me the first few hours of cursing at my computer to figure out how to use the layers an shit in the editing program. I may have just dug my grave, I mean confirmed my appointment as the "designer" of things for this group now but I don't even mind!

gain one new resume item - looks great!

it looks good but you should probably save it as a png instead of a jpg to avoid the compression artifacts you can see in the solid red areas

looks very nice. perhaps remove "www." from the facebook url?

I was WONDERING why the red looked so muddy. ilx is so helpful.

Uh the file size is over 13MB. Is that insane? I wanted it to be scalable so it'd be clean on larger monitors or in case anyone ever tried to use it for print, but that's big.

how large is the image in pixels?

2600 x 3800, roughly.

if it's for screen only it doesn't need to be that large i guess.

O...kay. I don't know how to decrease the um density? of the img layer without affecting anything else.

i'm not familiar with the program you're using ... the image is made up of layers?

The full ad is a lot of layers...every text box, every shape, and every text LINE is a different layer. I may have done that wrong, I wish all the elements that are the same type/class as each other were one layer but maybe I'm thinking like a printer and not like a designer (one film each for CMYK and one for black text).

The photo it's all laid on top of is its own layer too.

right so for the final image you'll flatten all the layers ... which will result in a smaller file size.

btw nothing wrong with layers for everything.

Right - but what can you do? The little Adana 5x8 press I mostly use (one of these:
https://s.yimg.com/pw/images/spaceout.gif) produces what pressure I can generate with my right arm so the type's probably in less peril than some!

Hm.

https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3348/3188089101_8c221e979c_z.jpg

I know. I'm not that careful. I use more pressure than I should, but I also don't do a ton of hand typesetting. I have a mixed of old foundry type and newer monotype. I use various presses but usually the stuff I handset is printed on my Pilot, which is bigger than that, but still a table-top. Just last weekend I did an entire invitation in handset semi-bold futura and wanted some impression so I really had to slam it. At that point I'm less worried about the type than I am about the arm on the pilot holding up. Printing less is much easier to maintain good printing even w/ a bit of impression. This last project, I broke a ton of rules.

I am currently engaged in a (possibly doomed) (certainly insane) multi-year personal project which involves many hours of my painfully-slow handsetting body text; the last bit I did more or less filled the 8inx5in chase on my press (with just a tiny margin for spacers and quoins) and it was really hard to get anything like an acceptable impression. Happily the project doesn't require crispness all the time so I wasn't too hard on myself about it.

obvious answer is to break the text up and not print it all at once. Will make a big difference. The kind of paper matters and especially important, though I've never done it, is dampening the paper. People claim to get way better results and better impression.

Those sound like interesting but risky options!

nothing risky, dampening is a totally traditional thing, works best with nicer papers.

http://www.briarpress.org/14535

I've read various methods, some people use homemade humidors and do all kinds of things. Or have a humidifier going and hold the paper against it. Or stacking your paper with every other sheet sprayed wet in a plastic bag overnight before printing.

And breaking up the text shouldn't be so hard. If you have a good lock-up you should be able to just lock up a paragraph then replace it with spacing.

Just joined a group selling letterpress stuff, based in europe:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/745025778976939/

scroll down someone is selling M&H .918 san serif @ symbols

Thanks - will take a look when I can get on to my wife's Facebook account! It's a © rather than an @ I need, mind, I have plenty of @s!

The problem with splitting blocks of text on my little press is not setting or locking-up type accurately, it's making sure the paper is in precisely the correct place. The little arm on which the paper sits (which I always want to call a lay gauge but isn't) is just not stable or consistent enough to get to the <1mm accuracy required to avoid the blocks looking joltingly mis-aligned.

Plus this project mostly involves printing on ephemera and found or hand-cut paper - virtually none of it is "nice" and generally I've found it in limited quantities so I'd be scared of dampening it.

oh I misread that you need copyright and not at sign.

I've never used an adana, do you have room to use proper registration pins, or even a homemade system with some double-stick tape and plastic? Might be able to get something more consistent. Regardless, you'd still have to be really careful.

I have had conflicting advice on the use of pins - some people I've spoken to swear by them, others say they cause unnecessary damage. I will give them a go at some point!

Thread delivers!

Damage? Because of some unique way the adana works? Because that's how all printing is done on all platen presses for a couple hundred years! I use the Kort Quad guides, as the cheaper/more common Megill pins move to easily. I also have the Double Grip pins but they're a bit too big and unwieldily for the pilot, and the new Henry Compressible pins which are also a pain to adjust because they lose tackiness, but good for when you don't have the clearance.

Truthfully, I'm not sure; I don't think the Adana is unique, though.

Registration pins is how all platen presses work. The only damage is if the pins hit the type. Unless you're printing type off the edge of the paper, that can be easily avoided. The thing that really scares people is using the pins with a base to mount polymer plates, that's why people are using the "compressible" pins (which are just a bit of plastic and a bit of double-sided tape. Then you just have to be careful, but the smaller the press and the bigger the base, the more likely you'll have problems.

I've just bashed together a site to cover the project I mentioned a little way upthread, if anyone's interested:

https://thebookofdisquiet.wordpress.com

(Going to spam ILB with this also, apols if you see it twice.)

looks awesome.

Just wanted to post here that I've spent the last year trying to learn about color management and I maybe understand about 30% of it.

I know literally nothing about colo(u)r management. I don't even know what it is. Heh. I'll have a look on Wikipedia later.

i did a course on it and i'm still lost.

I am reassured to find that colour management has no relevance to the part of my print-life that I care about. Phew.

(I've just had a paper accepted for an academic conference about letterpress in the modern world, which has made me pleased and scared in equal part since I am neither an academic nor a proper printer.)

Color theory was the required class in my art program against which the ships of many hopeful art majors were dashed. I saw people reduced to tears.

can you share the paper? Would love to see it.

Still thinking about writing a book on Pre-press for Letterpress. Wondering if it should be expanded to Pre-press for silkscreen as well (which would need more help), or go even further and include it in a book about contemporary production techniques and issues, and by contemporary, that would have to include things like letterpress.

I have wondered about color management in the context of letterpress, whether there's any worth in actually using measuring devices to measure colors you're printing, but it's really not worth it.

mad piratical, where was your course? was it part of a photography or design program?

I'm actually pretty bad with color theory and need to bone up on that. Color management is more about the technical control of matching colors from input devices to your monitor to the printer.

xp I will (at least the abstract) when I've written it! I don't suppose I'll ever write the whole thing down because it will be (at least in part) about the book project linked a few posts back. The project won a prize in Minnesota, btw, which will likely end up as one of the high points of my life!

Have you seen the OttoGraphic series of screenprinted screenprint manuals? They are useful and beautiful, here's the general screenprint one; he does one or two more specialised ones also: http://www.ottographic.co.uk/books/manuals/screen-printing-manual.html

neither – it was a special one-off course an employer (ad agency) send me on to help colour manage images before sending to print.

xposts

http://www.ottographic.co.uk/books/manuals/ewExternalFiles/PhotoshopManual_ottoGraphic_detail2_web.jpg

neato!

That's beautiful, will have to check it out.

There hasn't really been great books for letterpress. A lot of collections of work. The only contemporary things I can think of are Paul Moxan's Vandercook Maintenance book and Gerald Lange's Printing Digital Type.

There was also this Barbara Henry book, the Joy of Vandercooking which had some interesting stuff.

Not surprisingly all of those focus on Vandercooks.

For platen presses there's the reprinted General Printing. Otherwise best off getting vintage books. I have them ALL! Some of the fun is using google books and reading really ancient books, because some of the concepts are still the same.

i want to buy all of the screenprinting books now. A lot of the concepts probably relate to any kind of printing.

90% of everything I've ever designed was for the web or printed on a giant in-house inkjet so I never really had to care all that much about color management. For screen it was always at some point out of my control, and for print I could get things good enough to be fine with it and most of it was ephemera anyway.

But I remember in grad school how the photographers would spend hours or days tweaking all the color settings on the printers to get things exactly right; I get that for them there was one singular "ideal" version of a print but at some point it felt diminishing returns as there were indistinguishable differences between the 75th and 76th test prints.

in an ideal world, color management makes that unnecessary. The point is if your monitor is calibrated and your printer is profiled, you don't need test prints because your print matches your screen, more or less (usually less, but it'll get you close).

My interest in color management is born from years of not knowing what I'd get. All my work was done in either two contexts:

1) I work for a major advertising or retail company and do the layouts and the vendor pulls expensive proofs and hand-delivers them to us for mark-up and we just pay for it

2) I'm doing my freelance stuff/personal work and there's no money for proofs and the vendor doesn't give a shit about us and our jobs are probably ganged up with a bunch of other jobs and it's really hard to have any idea ahead of time what my imagery and colors will look like.

The frustration of number 2 has led me to want to learn about this.

I spent a really tough six months caught between a picture editor who wanted exactly what he saw on the endlessly calibrated LaCie monitor, and a knackered 20-year-old colour broadsheet press where the ink densities were done by the lads when they got back from the pub.

“I want more black! These monos are all grey”
“Fuck’s sake, it’s so black it’s already coming off on my hands - look at this, I’ve got a perfect image of the front on my forearms”

We've fallen foul of Tumblr's new anti-smut bots. This video was flagged by their system. It's clearly a rather over-imaginative system with an eye for (unintended) visual metaphor and subtext. https://t.co/zhT8nFhyCX pic.twitter.com/Y8XiXp84ny

— The Bodleian Libraries (@bodleianlibs) January 29, 2019

Hilarious.

My color management training and experience is increasing.

i've also recently taken a class in the exciting and trendy world of Risograph.

I may teach a class soon that's a sort of overview on printing/prepress for designers, production artists, printers etc.

I think there's a lot of people with deep expertise on certain aspects of the industry/art, but if I have anything to offer, it's the wide range of interest which can be helpful.

So let me know if anybody here has any questions!

In case anyone here's interested, here's the book-length thing I've been working on for a couple of years (and printing for 18 months or so): https://thehalfpintpress.wordpress.com/imaginary-letters-by-mary-butts/

I see upthread that I was having trouble with getting blocks of text to print properly - this time I had the experience and the courage to follow Dan's advice and print blocks of text in separate sections. (Also I was mostly working with bought stock so could afford a higher-than-usual level of spoil.

Now I have to work out how to get the thing out into the world.

Beautiful!

this looks incredible

Working on a document for work and thought I'd share something I came up with that's definitely a FAQ in this world:

View distance

It’s important to note that without knowing the context, vendors will often ask for images to be 300 dpi at 100% scale. This is rarely necessary. We’ve established a rough guideline for recommended image resolution based on how far away the viewer will be:

Viewing Distance Minimum Resolution
arm’s length 300 DPI (as low as 240)
2 – 4 ft (.6 – 1.2 m) 200 DPI
4 – 6 ft (1.2 – 1.8 m) 170 DPI
6 – 8 ft (1.8 – 2.4 M) 130 DPI
8 – 10 ft (2.4 – 3 m) 100 DPI
10 – 14 ft (3 – 4.3 M) 75 DPI
14 – 18 ft (4.3 – 5.5 M) 40 DPI
18+ FT (5.5+ M) away 20 DPI

With the caveat that the quality of the artwork, the graininess of the photograph, the amount of texture or detail in the image all will affect quality. When in doubt, print a swatch at 100%.

sorry for the screwed up formatting. I know more about print than I do about the internet.

anybody have a few spare hours this week to help me put together a portfolio and maybe website? my idea is pretty simple, and i'm sure somebody who is competent at this thing could do it rather easily. i'm just an idiot @ photoshop and web design. if you're interested in helping out, send your rates to me via ILX mail

Just use wix / square space / Wordpress etc template.

i have some specific design needs that need to be addressed first, but yeah once that's done i think i'd be able to figure out how to just drop it into a squarespace-type platform

Just wanted to post here that I've spent the last year trying to learn about color management and I maybe understand about 30% of it.

I'd say it's up to 64% now.

the Dove's Press story (font thrown into thames at hammersmith) featured in last night's Master Crafters (which was otherwise about teaching the youth letterpress techniques)

it's repeated tonight on Sky Arts, freeview 36, at 19:00

(the two tutuors seemed to be called Hand and Bills which amused me. it was these guys, based in Bristol - https://www.theletterpresscollective.org/ )

Nick Hand did a thing a few years back where he fixed the kind of press I use to the back of a pushbike and rode around the country printing stuff. How he managed to make such a good job of it is beyond me (or at least way beyond my printing skills).

i'm finally divested from the letterpress world. Sold the last of my equipment and most of my books in the last year or two, finally unsubscribed from the mailing list. It feels weird to have invested so much time and money into something and then to move on like that. Feels the same as when I quit being a wedding DJ. It's like "I have some knowledge about this, shame it's gone to waste". Some of it builds towards other things I still do in life/career at least.

Of course I'm debating doing the same with the digital printing I've been doing for the last few years as it's been increasingly hard to find the time to do it and learn it right. I feel like I'm missing something, where I learn all the basic stuff and things work reasonably well, but then I try to learn the next level and suddenly it's advanced math. But mostly my day job has me in the office 3 days a week so I don't have time to really test and explore and focus on that, so my attention is going elsewhere.

I'm still printing occasionally and happy to collaborate with people who understand the turnarounds I can handle, but even that seems hard. Printing is one of those things where people generally need it SOON.