Alberta Design Blog

Yes. Mistakes happen. Yes. We make them. Mistakes teach designers what they’ve missed, and what they don’t know. Mistakes also give us the opportunity to show integrity, and to make things right. I think mistakes are the single greatest opportunity to show you care about clients. Will you abandon them or make it right? Will you take your lumps or be indignant? Heroes don’t often rise when nothing is wrong. read more

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So I have this book… my Dad gave it to me in 1979. It’s a Christmas book about Santa’s workshop. I treasure this book. I keep it in a box and it only comes out once a year for about 2 weeks. Thing is, this is one of those pop-up books with flaps and tabs and things to pull and tug . I remember playing with it, I can almost recite it and it’s a Huge part of my personal heritage. My kids now have that link to my past and we can enjoy it together.

The thing that amazes me about this book – that in the mid 1970′s a book like this would be conceived and designed completely by hand. The intricate die-cutting was all planned with a pencil, exacto knife and many many mock-ups. This is mind boggling. We build die-cuts all the time and it’s pretty normal for us here at Redpoint. But we’re cutting square brochures and pocket folders. The craftsmanship that went into this 30-year-old-Hallmark book is amazing. read more

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Lately we’ve been working with a myriad of suppliers who print a myriad of products. We’ve found out some interesting things regarding printing and colour calibration. The biggest thing it seems, (though unsupported by any empirical data) is that with the release of the Adobe Creative Suite 3, colour calibration is simply more important than it was with CS1 or CS2.

Here’s the catch: even suppliers that DON’T use colour calibration, or equipment doesn’t require it, will have their software set to some kind of default setting. If you send files optimized to a different ‘default’ your output will vary. The moral of this story is: match your file to the final output profile, every time. And yes it’s annoying to manage on every job, but it’s important.

The good news is that there some simple steps you can take to improve your calibration.

• First, Talk to your printer. They should have a profile for you to use. If not, they will likely use a default, at least unknowingly;
• First-and-a-half, if your printer supplies a colour profile, simply use it and go to step three, otherwise continue to step two;
• Second, if no profile is provided, set up your colour management to use one of the defaults from the “North American General Purpose 2” set, choosing paper finish, and ink types;
• Third, go for coffee, since you are probably done;
• And forth, make a list of the profiles your suppliers use and remember to customize for each project.

As far as I can tell, very few printers in the Alberta area take profiling very seriously, so a default will be what most professional and in-house designers will need to use. It’s a tool that is under-utilized in our province, but most printers make up for it with accurate colour match-proofs so you can at least see what you will get on the press and make adjustments at the proofing stage.

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Remember to turn Overprint Preview ON.

It recently occurred to us that some very simple pdf tricks can assist many of you when you are proofing your projects with us. Have you ever printed a piece and noticed the reversed (white) logos were missing, even though you had seen them on your approved pdf proofs? Here is a quick trick to fend off the logo stealing gremlins.

The moral of this story is very simple. Always, always proof digital pdfs with the Overprint Preview turned on.

Just follow these steps:

• First, download this pdf example.
• Then, open it in either Acrobat Reader, or the full version of Acrobat. If you don’t have either, download the free Reader here.
• With the file open, you see 4 lines of text and 2 logos – white and black.
• In the upper text menu in your software, go to Advanced>Overprint Preview (this may be different/unavailable on some versions of your software) . You will see some of the white text and the white logo magically disappear. So what has happened?
• It’s actually very simple – the white text and logo are set to Overprint white. But you can’t overprint white, since on a printing press, white is the absence of ink. You can’t print nothing. White is nothing, as far as the printing press is concerned.
• The Overprint Preview allows you to see what the printing press sees. This means, if it’s not visible with the preview on, the press won’t see it, and viola, the logo gremlins have struck! Since the white logo here disappeared, if we were sending this to press as is, there would be no logo on the final printed pieces. Very bad.
• Toggle back and forth by turning the preview on and off. Note that this can affect text as well. So what do you do?
• First, don’t send the pdf to the printer! And secondly, tell us that there was an issue and we’ll fix it. It’s that simple.

Next time you proof a digital pdf from us, a printer or another design firm, remember to proof with this preview turned on. It has the potential to save many avoidable reprints—and dollars.

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