I advise you read the first part of this tutorial, so you understand the reason of this ste-by-step tutorial. Wrongly set screen angles and frequency can cause your job to print incorrectly. Most designers won’t need to deal with those settings, as printers will most likely do that themselves, but extra knowledge on this won’t hurt.

You are required to have Adobe Acrobat Professional, Adobe PS or any other driver that will allow you to make PostScript or PDF files. You will not be able to use the built-in Export to PDF option in InDesign or Export Layout as… in QuarkXPress to do what is described in this tutorial. With InDesign and Illustrator you will also have to produce separated files to be able to change screen angles. More »

Sometimes, when printing Duotone images, the printed result isn’t what you expected. Your images seem to have a strange dotted pattern which wasn’t in your digital file. This is caused by wrongly set screen angles. To understand this, it is necessary to understand what a screen is in printing.

Ink is layed on paper in form of tiny little dots that, combining each other, give you the illusion of continuos colour. You have a number of black dots, cyan dots, magenta dots and yellow dots that are printed on paper and combine to produce your orange, your brown, your red and all the other colours that can be obtained by mixing CMYK.

More »

Self promotion is very important for freelance designers. If you want to get clients, you need to let them know you exist, you need to tell them what you can do, and, most of all, you need to show it to them. To that end having a portfolio is not an option, and it is the only tool that will actually tell the tale about your ability to design. Even if you don’t plan to work as a freelancer, you still have to show your work to the companies that will hire you.

Jacci Howard Bear has written a 6 day course that will give you guidelines, tips and directions that will help you put together a portfolio which will speak for itself. As she puts it:

“Desktop publishing or graphic design portfolios should be more than just a few samples thrown into any old folder. Potential employers or clients use examples of your work to help determine whether they want to hire you. The samples you choose for graphic design portfolios and how you present them can affect whether or not you get the job.”

This is an email course with lessons sent to you daily, however you can do the course at your own pace.

Remember that if you can’t present a good image of yourself, others won’t be compelled to put theirs in your hands.

Adobe released Creative Suite 3 today, which is probably their biggest release ever. Since the merge with Macromedia a lot of speculation has gone on about which programs were to make it into the Suite and which ones were to be ditched. For the web designers who were wondering, GoLive has been replaced by Dreamweaver, for starters. You will find Acrobat 8 in CS 3 Design Standard Edition (finally!) and Flash in the Premium Edition. Yet talking about CS 3 as 1 suite is a mistake. There are 6 different suites, which address the needs of print designers, web designers and video editors.

Sue Chastain of About Graphics Software presents us a comprehensive and very hard to beat overview of the Suite, so I am not going to repeat what she has one, and, without any more delay, I encourage you to see the overview for yourself.

An image that is 500 x 600 pixels is probably bigger in inches that an image that is 400 x 300 pixels, you say. Well, in actual fact that might be not true when you print your image. The image size also depends on the resolution of the image. Sometimes a bigger image is smaller than a smaller image. Now that I have confused you enough, let’s have a look at this carefully.

Take this example: you have an image that is 300 x 400 pixels. When you view that image on screen it will always look like an image that is 300 x 400 pixels indipendently from the resolution. And you say: “D’oh! OBVIOUSLY it will.” Have a look at what that means though: if you view an image on screen that is 300 x 400 pixels with a resolution of 72 ppi (pixels per inch) it will look the same on screen as an image that is 300 x 400 pixels with a resolution of 300 ppi. More »

Want to see our (Italy’s) brand new logo? Here it is! (I am seriously hoping Wordpress won’t stop working because of this.)

And here is the news about it.

I ain’t going around with that scribble representing me. It’s a joke, not only to our country but also to our design industry. I know you all thought I am Italian, but really, my name is Elizabeth Brown. I swear.

I was travelling to work by train, as usual. I guess I am not in the best of moods when I am still fresh from bed, but I was getting really irritated by the doors between compartments. I don’t know how many times I have had to help elderly people get through them because those doors are really heavy. Surely the person who designed them was thinking of a way to make sure the doors closed themselves without mechanisms that could wear off. Impeccable logic if it wasn’t for the fact that people can’t even open them. Yet there are several trains like that.

Another time, still travelling by train this time for totally ludicrous reasons, I notice the train has nice glass doors between compartments. I go though one and take a sit, wondering whether there was the same designer behind this idea. It didn’t take long to realize that it probably was the same designer. The door kept banging and the noise was really annoying. If it didn’t bang, it still made noise because of the vibrations of the train. This door was easy to open, but it never really closed. More »

Have you ever opened a magazine, read an article and wondered, “How did the designer think of THAT design element?”

This is a question I have asked myself so many times that I lost count. Then I again I haven’t been counting. As a designer you need to know how to visually communicate a message, that’s the essence of your job. Yet sometimes you see an article about cows and you see a bell or a stylized face of a cow used as a bullet. Or you are doing a car catalogue and you notice that the page numbers have the same elements of the logo of the car. Sometimes you manage to think at those things in a snap, while other times you just have a design block. What do you do in that situation? More »

It is very important to make sure all files sent to printers are press worthy. That means they won’t cause any problems once they hit the press, whether it be font problems, colours and so forth. While there are specific things that can be handled with a preflight checklist—Jacci Howard Bear has a very good one on her site—there are other things you need to account for. I am going to quickly roll them out in this article, and I will take each one up individually in articles to come. More »

While this is not a complete guide to PDFs, here you will find the major types of PDFs and their purposes

Like for any other graphics, a person using a PDF has to make sure he is using the right one for the job. Saying that a
PDF “is good for printing” is like saying that “EPS files contain vector graphics”. Both statements are inaccurate and to a certain degree even untrue. PDF files serve many purposes—you cannot use a PDF which was intended for onscreen viewing also for offset printing, unless you want poor results. PDFs that were originally intended for offset printing, cannot be used for online viewing due to their size, the same way you wouldn’t use TIFF or EPS files for web design.

As this is about Desktop Publishing, I won’t delve into the settings to be used for PDFs intended for screen viewing. The focus of this article is on those types of PDFs which can and should be used for printing.

More »