June 8th, 2006
Web designer’s guide to print design
Recently, I’ve been producing some conference materials for a certain conference in the UK. It’s been a while since I’ve done any print design in anger—in fact, it was two years ago when I produced a bunch of things for our wedding—but I’ve really enjoyed the process again and it’s pretty liberating to be designing for a media with so many conventions in place, both production and design.
I’m sure a lot of web designers are asked if they ‘do’ print. I’m positive a lot are put off because of the production. Printers can be scary, as can the whole production process, particularly for large scale projects. So, I thought it might be useful to explain a few things.
I’ve a feeling this may extend to several parts to really do it justice and provide something useful, but here goes anyway.
The right package for the job
There was a time when there was just one software package you had to use to produce print work: Quark XPress. I look fondly on those early days of using XPress. Yes it crashed all the time, was buggy as hell but wasn’t it just the perfect tool for the job? It was trim and had an intuitive interface. The problem was, that was all you could use. Not because of alteratives in the market, such as Aldus Pagemaker, but because the production side of the industry—repro houses and printers—used them, and only them. And at over a thousand pounds a licence, it wasn’t cheap to be a print designer. Thankfully, those days are long gone.
Adobe introduced Indesign, labelling it the ‘Quark Killer’. A few industry pundits were skeptical. There’s no chance a bloated piece of software, such as Indesign, could compete. Well, it could (mostly due to the failings of Quark’s latest XPress versions) and did and now thanks to the rise in PDF as a standard format, we’re seeing Quark struggle to justify its ridiculous price tag.
So, those are two industry standard pieces of software for page layout: Quark XPress and Adobe Indesign. You can of course use other software packages such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop for other design elements, but for creating multi-page documents, those are just the ticket.
Types of printing
The first hurdle, is deciding on your printing process. What is going to be most effective for the piece you are designing? What is going to be the most cost effective?
There are many different methods of printing. Two are more commonly used when designing for brochures, letetrheads etc, so I’m just going to deal with them here. Digital printing and Offset Lithography.
Digital printing
In my experience, digital printing has always been ignored by production managers I’ve worked with. This was always due to poor quality, both colour and finished surface. Digital printing didn’t, and still doesn’t, have the same quality as Litho or Flexography. But the differences are becoming less and less obvious as technology in the field increases. So, when would you use Digital?
- For short full colour print runs
- For quick turn around
Advantages
- Generally cheaper
- No plates or films to be produced, therefore costs are limited
- Quick turnaround
- Large format printing
Disadvantages
- Colour recognition can be poor
- Digital printing can often produce banding on flat colour (the same as inkjet printers)
- Expensive for large qualities
- Same price for full colour as it is for spot colour
- Limitations on printing to certain paper types/weights
How does it work?
In basic terms, digital printing is like your desktop printer, just on a bigger, more expensive scale. An operator can load up some PDF artwork, press print and away you go. You can see how turn-around can be so much quicker, the whole production process is so much quicker than traditional methods.
Offset lithography
Offset Lithography, or just ‘litho’ as it’s often referred, is perhaps the most common method of printing onto paper. Both CMYK and Spot colour can be used. CMYK is full colour printing, whereas Spot colour uses specific Pantone colours, I’ll get onto to talking more about that though. The process for litho can be daunting and drawn out, it involves many steps, which each have their own dependancies and can be expensive if screwed up. First of all, there’s the planning up, or pagination.
Printing presses use large plates to transfer the image to paper, the most common in the UK is B2 size, which is slightly larger than A2. In order to make maximum usage of the paper and plate, several items can be ‘planned up’ on one plate. This can be incredibly complex for a designer to get his/her head around, let alone do it. Luckily, most printers do this for you. When they’re doing though, just a tip — check to see if there’s extra room. Sometimes you can get freebies produced on the back of client work, such as business cards or promotional flyers.
Next up is the films. In litho printing, film is produced from your pdf or Indesign file on an imagesetter and then a metal printing plate is made from that. There needs to be a different plate produced for every colour used. So, in a CMYK job, that’s 4 plates for every full colour page. You can see how things can become expensive if there’s a typo?
Then we have proofs. Once the films are made, proofs are produced by the printers to give to the designers to check and sign-off so the plates can be produced. These proofs (cromalins or colourmatch), are colour accurate, but can be expensive. Many production managers and designers still want to see proofs made with films despite the rise of technology such as ‘Direct to Press’ printing which cuts out the production of films and goes straight to plates.
One the proofs are signed off, the plates are made and the printing begins.
When would you use Offset Lithography?
Well, I’ve used it most of the time. It’s only recently, now that digital is really starting to improve, have I started to use alternatives.
Advantages
- Superior quality
- Availibility
- Cost effective for large print runs
- Wide variety of paper stocks to print on
Disadvantages
- Can be expensive
- Lead time and turn around
- Expensive to rectify mistakes
How does it work?
Offset Lithography is a bit weird. It uses the repulsion of oil and water to transfer the image to the paper. The plates are chemically treated to accept oil based inks, and repel water, on the image areas and the opposite happens with non image areas.
A plate first contacts rollers of a clean solution or water and then is inked by other rollers. The oil-based ink ‘sticks’ to the image area. The image is then transferred from the plate to a rubber blanket. The rubber blanket then transfers the image onto the paper’s surface. This is why it’s called ‘offset’, because the plate never actually touches the paper.
A part two
It looks like this could be longer than I anticipated. Damn. So, when I get round to it, I’ll do another part. (and probably another and another — in fact it probably should be a simple step series, but we’ll see how I go, could end up more than five steps.)
In the meantime, it might be helpful if you could tell me where you’ve had difficulty in the past, what do you know and what don’t you know about designing for print?
Hi Mark,
I am a web designer that does print too! I think it is interesting that with the advances in digital printing, you still use offset printing so much. It is true what you said about some of the issues with digital printing (at least in the past), but even some of those problems have been solved. I have been dealing with a digital printing company lately that does print jobs without limitations on paper (or nearly anyways) and the quality is the absolute best I have seen anywhere as far as digital is concerned. You could honestly be fooled into thinking it was offset printing. Interesting read though. I wish this had been in my feed reader when I first started doing print design.
Good little start, Mark.
I look forward to the rest. You do say that you’ll return to Pantone colours in Litho printing, but I thought I’d mention (as an advantage for Litho) the great effects that you can get using solid inks; Metallic and fluorescent inks are a good example. Also, solid colours are generally much brighter than those produced using a digital printer. Try getting a really bright orange colour using CMYK (especially digital) and it’ll turn out a dirty brown. Just for your readers information, there is a great book by Alan Pipes called ‘Production for Graphic Designers’, which explains a lot of information to the print virgin. Cheers.
Nice write-up, Mark. It might be worth it to mention the rise of “gang-run” offset shops. If a piece is pretty standard (i.e. a standard size and stock, few custom cuts/folds, etc.) it is possible to get offset quality on the cheap for short-runs from places like 48HourPrint or 4by6. We like using them for business cards, sell sheets, and other things that you might not want 20,000 of but still want offset quality.
Mark, I’m loving this. As a web designer who is basically self-taught and never has really had to do much print work, it’s great info. I get the occasional request from my employer to do a print job, and this is exactly the kind of background info that I never really learned. Thanks so much for doing this.
I really appreciate this writeup and look forward to the follow ups. Similar to Jeff, I haven’t gone through any formal training and print can be very expensive to self-teach. Also, I am currently working on my wedding stationary and would really enjoy some info/tips about something so specific. I would appreciate it if you could also talk a little bit about some of the cheaper online print shops, what sort of method they use, what quality of job you feel they do and etc (vistaprint and overnightprints come to mind).
William: I’ve used digital a few times recently and I always have trouble with flat colour. With photography and simple text, it can be a joy though.
Kurt: Thanks. I am goign to move onto colour and mention spot, process and other things such as varnish and foil blocking. The more I think about it, the more I’m concerned I’ve bitten off more than I can chew!
Nathan: Absolutely. That’s a good point. I’ve never used them personally, but I’ve heard good things.
Jeff: I had a feeling a lot of web designers get this and are daunted by the whole process. On the web, it’s easy to rectify a mistake, you just upload it again. In print, there’s a potentially expensive sense of perminance. It still scares the crap out of me everytime I check proofs.
Mike: What I might do is talk through setting up a small documentwhich you could send to one of the online print shops. A lot of them accept PDF files, but you need to know about bleed, colour process, trapping (maybe) and other things in order to get the best out of your print run. Hopefully, I’ll get onto to covering this shortly.
Good primer so far. I’m a print designer who started “doing” web design a couple of years ago, so it’s interesting to see this angle.
I would add that although digital printing always seemed, and seems, promising, it’s shortcomings often make it prohibitive. Clients hate to hear that solid colors will look bad, and that their corporate PMS will look similar but not exact. However, depending on the client and the project’s requirements, it’s certainly an option to consider.
William, am I mistaken that digital printing only prints 4-color, converting all specified spot colors to their 4-color approximations?
Thanks for such an enlightening story … printing is a dark black art to me, and it terrifies me so much so that I know I have knocked back otherwise easy, profitable work in the past. Scaredy-cat!
The irony of this is that one of my best mates is a damn guru at print … he knows the processes so well, he rarely—if ever—has any problems … and here’s the funny thing: my mate thinks web/multimedia is the blackest of all arts. He is terrified, and he knocks back work as well.
Maybe the two of us should form a partnership …
Thanks again for the post!
Regards,
Peter
“What I might do is talk through setting up a small documentwhich you could send to one of the online print shops. A lot of them accept PDF files, but you need to know about bleed, colour process, trapping (maybe) and other things in order to get the best out of your print run. Hopefully, I?ll get onto to covering this shortly.”
Do it. Just do it. Please! :)
It’s been said already, but setting up documents/PDF export options so that printers don’t scowl at you would be great.
I’ve done a few print jobs here and there and have even taken a short production course — but, no matter how big the project is, print still scares the hell out of me.
I’m yet another web-designer who occasionally gets asked to do print stuff. I’m also very grateful for the article.
I have to admit that I get completely confused by the spot-colour vs. CMYK issue. Would love to hear more about how it all works.
Good article and great explanation of the differences between the print types. Luckily for me, we have a nicely delineated sharing of roles here — I do all the web stuff and my Wife does all the print stuff ; )
Some info on colour management and some of the bizarre things which happen when you convert stuff to PDF would be great for future articles.
It’s funny that you mention web designers being put off by the production side of print work; I’m a print designer who’s hugely turned off by the idea of coding, style sheets, etc. For some reason, I find pre-press production stuff really interesting, even though I have little patience when trying to understand back-end stuff for web.
The best advice I can give for someone who wants to learn about designing for print? Go talk to a printer. Really. They don’t bite (well, most of them
don’t), and they’ll be secretly thrilled to pass on wisdom that will ultimately benefit them. I’d even go so far as to say that if you’re really, really serious, go and visit a printer and ask to be shown around, and learn on the job as it were. I did this after leaving college (I volunteered at a printer for about six weeks doing pre-press, platemaking and eventually printing), and it was the best thing I ever did. Now, obviously, not everyone can do this, but if you speak to the people who do this stuff day in and day out, you’ll learn where the pitfalls are and how to avoid them. They’ll also give you the settings for Quark, InDesign, Illustrator, PhotoShop and Acrobat to get the best quality files to hand off to them.
The other thing I would do is invest in a preflight program like Flightcheck and learn how to use it. It’ll save you hour of heartache, and money. More importantly, both your printer and your clients will love you.
Finally, Go to Sappi’s website (they’re a paper mill) and order all the brochures in their knowledge bank, particularly <a href=“http://www.sappi.com/SappiWeb/Knowledge bank/The Standard/”>The Standard</a> and the <a href=“http://www.sappi.com/SappiWeb/Knowledgebank/Technical brochures/”>technical brochures</a>. You can get them as PDF’s too, but order as printed documents — they’re free and they’re packed full in great information. I particularly recommend the Varnish Techniques and the How To Read A Press Sheet brochure.
Following on from what I wrote above (Thanks, Mark!), there are two more books to recommend: <a href=“http://www.internationalpaper.com/Paper/Paper Products/Pocket Pal Home.html”>Pocket Pal</a> from International Paper, and Forms, Folds and Sizes by Poppy Evans. Both are invaluable.
Following suit, I’m also a web designer that has had a major interest in print design, but I’ve never had the chance to do it. Part of it definitely scares me, but it seems interesting.
That was a nice article even though I knew most of it. Not because I have an education in this field but because I have been lucky to rent office space in a print house. I have worked mainly with screen media for most of my career so far and autodidact at that too. In that sense I have learnt some very valuable lessons by working side by side the prepress guys and the offset press operators.
My advice for the entrepreneur web developer is to contact a local print house (the bigger the better) and ask if they have any office space for rent or if they can make room for you. You will have the benefit of learning a great deal of things and they get “in house” web expertise as well as rent money of course. I also get a lot of work through these guys and they get some through me so that’s an added bonus.
There are a lot of excellent, high end Digital Print methods that you can easily use for large runs and layouts.
Now, anything that’s an Oce Lightjet, although not optimally suited for large runs, will have a serious impressive output compared to much of the print technology with none of the issues you’ve listed—that is a printer similar to a photography development device.
Hi-Fi printers, which run of Cyan Magenta Yellow Black Light Cyan Light Magenta Orange Green, can produce a significant amount of color improvements over the standard issue digital machine.
It should also be pointed out that Pigment and Dye printers typically lack the banding you describe (although to achieve outdoor quality you need to use certified outdoor material, and typically they have a short life span). Solvent printers are usually the banding disaster, but I only find those in machines similar to Scitex large formats—Roland’s Eco Solvet machines output beautifully.
Now, for large runs using something like an Inca flatbed can be significantly cheaper than offset, considering the setup is so minimal and output is comparable to much of digital—but the color quality can and typically is just as high as much of the offset or large format screen print options out there.
I’ve ran alot of printers before I became an creative director—I know this is a gray area for most print designers, but digital is not that weak… most of the problem here is that ‘color science’ and callibration is still an art where very few of us can claim a mastering of—and that’s typically the shift in color where people notice.
Side Notation: a great feature for InDesign is it’s integration of XML—case example for one of our sites academystudios.com, their data is all XML (articles and the like) which they can dynamically link to their brochure/catalog in indesign, and it will update in real time. Another blessing of the print/web mix:)
One thing I forgot—Mimaki makes a digital printer with a white color output, that allows you to do an underlay similar to screenprinting or print white as needed on multiple papers. There are also florescent inks you can swap out to most machines, though not supported by the manufacturer and can potentially harm certain machine parts if you don’t take caution, which add extra kick to digital printing when needed. Again, though the weakness is almost always color calibration, ICC profiles from your print designs to your digital machines… but most web programmers will feel right at home with the technical information
Sorry if those comments came off crass, it’s a touchy subject for designers I know:) To help out, I’m going to writesome articles on the subject technically in support and reference to your site as I build my external blog if you don’t mind, and I’m starting with a many part series on color science, but not just for print.
They weren’t Brady — they were great comments! And you’re following them up with a superb set of articles. Just read the first one, looking forward to the rest.
Mark,
Thanks for the article. I’m a web designer who occasionally himself in the deep waters of print design. One issue that is most frustrating to me is color; both in terms of color spaces (RGB, CMYK, etc.) and color matching (spot color and Pantone).
It’s also sometimes hard to manage client education and expectation in this regard. My clients just want their logo color to look consistent between their letterhead (printed offset) and their datasheets (printed on an in-office laserjet) and I sometimes don’t know what to tell them.
Any tips on color would be lovely.
Brady great points..
Enjoying both yours and mark articles :D
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