Presentation on the basics of Print Design I presented to the team of ACT 360 on Jan 2017.

1. How not to piss off your
Printing Press
Swapnil Acharya

4. Design Disasters
I’ve made more mistakes than I’ve handled successful print projects.
Trust me!

8. Ever wondered why your design
looks terrific on screen but dull
and dim on print?

10. Before you start to design
• Understanding your tools
• Understanding what you’re designing
• Understanding the media format

11. Know your tools.
• Adobe InDesign is the mostly commonly found, and most commonly used
publishing tool for designers.
• Adobe Photoshop is great for image optimizing.
For content creation - a big NO-NO!
• A number of Adobe software might work together. eg. InDesign for publishing,
Photoshop for editing and Illustrator for drawing.

12. What you’re designing
Understand the process, components and concept

13. Step 1: Content Design
• Content is the King. Without content, no design can exist.
• Get the content together (paragraphs of text, data, images)
• Generally done by an Editor, but you as a designer can chip in.
• PRO TIP: Do not proceed to design until the content is finalized.

14. Step 2: Image Processing
• Get the photos/media/artwork together
• Compose
• Optimize

15. Compiling Artwork

16. Vector Art Bitmap Art
Illustrations
Clip Art
Icons
Patterns
Photos
Paintings
Scans
Visualizations

17. Composing and Image Editing

20. Optimization

21. Optimizing Appearance
Color, Contrast, Brightness
(discussed later)
Optimizing Performance
Compression, Format, Size
(discussed later)

22. Tips
• Vector images can be embedded
or copy/pasted into the document.
• The color is CMYK.
• File formats are EPS or AI.Vector
shapes can also be created inside
the layout itself.
• Bitmap Images used for a
document is measured in physical
units (inches or cm).
• The resolution is 300dpi.
• The color is CMYK.
• File formats are TIFF or PSD (JPG
is not recommended).

23. Step 3: Layout and Composition
• Page Setup
• Font
• Colors
• Links

24. Page Setup

25. • PAGE (or trim) is the actual
printing area of a document.
• BLEED is compensation for
printing machines to hold
the paper without tampering
the actual print area.
• MARGIN is a space allowing document
to be formatted for functional reading.

26. • COLUMNS are vertical blocks of
contents.
Lorem Ipsum is simply
dummy text of the printing
and typesetting industry.
Lorem Ipsum has been the
industry's standard dummy
text ever since the 1500s,
when an unknown printer
took a galley of type and
scrambled it to make a type
specimen book.
It has survived not only five
centuries, but also the leap
into electronic typesetting,
remaining essentially
unchanged. It was
popularised in the 1960s
with the release of Letraset
sheets containing Lorem
Ipsum passages, and more
recently with desktop
publishing software like
Aldus PageMaker including
versions of Lorem Ipsum.
• GUTTERS are spaces between the
columns.
• PARAGRAPH INDENTATION is
the space around a paragraph.
• PARAGRAPH SPACING is spaces
between paragraphs.

27. Understanding the plate system
• Each of the four colors used in a
document use an aluminum plate
as the blueprint.
• The printing machine uses the
blueprint template to “draw” the
design on paper, using the ink
that’s fed in.
• A plate can fit multiple pages.
Pages of a folded design (eg. book
magazine) are laid out in multiple
numbers.
• A plate also has the ink
concentration information, so a
printer can tell you if your design
is sipping up too much ink!

30. Fonts

31. The thing about fonts
• Each font has a personality.
• Each font has a purpose.
• Styles come and go like a fad; utility is eternal.
• Promote legibility and readability with fonts.

33. Use fonts for clarity.
Use fonts to reflect an emotion.
Usefontstomakea Statement.
Use fonts like you wear a suit to a ballroom dinner.

34. Tips
• If you’re going to print from
someone’s else’s computer, make
sure they have the font installed.
• Unlike Photoshop, without correct
fonts installed in the printing
computer, your document will not
be able to use that font.
• Some fonts are not embeddable in
a document for various reasons.
• Licensing a major reason why
fonts do not appear correctly on a
rendered PDF.

35. Color

36. Understanding colors
• They’re different in a sense because they’re not composed of how
we see them on screen.
• CMYK colors are basically one color overlapping on top of another
to produce a shade.
• Spot colors are pigmented ink (imagine wall paint).
• Your printer doesn’t understand the language of RGB. Don’t let it
misinterpret you!

39. Tips
• Use native spot percentage values
to render a color.
• Try as little overlapping of colors
for best color results.
• Make sure your image is optimized
to match the colors.
• Long streaks of text are always
pure black (K100).
• Always check your document for
color concentration before
sending it out to the press.

40. DEMO
Adjusting colors of an image in
Photoshop.

41. Consider this text in pure Cyan.

42. Now imagine it being hit by Magenta.Now imagine it being hit by Magenta.

43. …and then hit by the color Yellow.…and then hit by the color Yellow.…and then hit by the color Yellow.

44. and then again Black!and then again Black!and then again Black!and then again Black!

45. DEMO
Applying and adjusting colors in
InDesign.

46. Links

47. Links are external resources.
• Publishing software save images/graphics separately outside the
main program.
• Links are crucial for the document to render the graphics. This is
like an HTML page with a missing <img> source.
• Bitmaps are the most common link resources used in printing.
• This gives flexibility to edit and optimize the graphics separately.

49. Step 4: Proofing and Packaging
• Optimizing size and performance
• Creating proofs
• Bundling the package
• Sending it to the Printer

50. File Size

51. Why worry?
• For best result, use UNCOMPRESSED images in links. This ensures
the best fidelity print.
• Lower resolution links will appear blurred. They’ll look terrible on
print.
• Save your file as TIFF (or PSD).
• Don’t worry much about InDesign. It’s all XML in the backend so
doesn’t really matter!

52. DEMO
Optimizing links in Photoshop.

53. Proofs

54. Proofs are binding
• Meaning, this is what you tell the press the design looks like.
• Check for correct use of colors, broken links, bleed and trim.
• It also involves checking for typos, facts, page numbering, page
ordering.
• Once your proof is locked, you cannot really blame the printer
after this.

55. Packaging

56. The Final Checklist
• Put all the images in links folder.
• Put all the fonts in fonts folder.
• Put a copy of proof in jpg in proof folder.
• Put the final design file in source folder.
• Put a PDF or PS file with bleed in the root folder.

57. Also check
• If you have proper ordering of the pages.
• If your bleed size is correct.
• If all vectors appear okay in the document.

58. DEMO
Exporting the file.

59. Understanding the Media Format
• There are multiple formats printing job can be carried out on.
• Various size and format of paper requires different printing machine.
• Design has to be optimized across media to match suitability.

60. Four-color printing

61. Process printing
• This is the standard 4-color printing using the
four inks.
• Offset machines, sheet feeders and digital
printers use CMYK colors.
• Offset machines are best for small-scale printing.
• Sheet feeder machines are extremely fast and can
produce up to 150 pages per minute.

62. Pigment Printing

63. Pigment printing
• PANTONE (Spot Colors) use a shade of
ink to print.
• The color is directly exposed on the
paper to make the impression.
• Screen print is the more basic style of
printing in one ink.

64. Further Discussions