For anyone who has to interact with graphic designers. This document covers all sorts of vocabulary, concepts and techniques implimented in the print industry.
Photography goes hand in hand with printing. A photo may look nice online, or viewed on the back of the camera that took it, but nothing beats holding a printed glossy 8x10. This document summarizes the general printing process.
Elements and Principles of Design, colour schemes, typefaces. Brief
There are a variety of methods to print an image. This day and age it's very rare that a computer isn't involved in the process. The advantages of the digital format include:
Once the Image is delivered to the printer the printer will print it. The final product really depends on the type of printer you send it to. There are many types of printers available. The most common printing methods are:
Standard Web Offset Press. Expensive for small runs, useless for one off's, but perfect for huge production runs.
Pantone, Black and white, 2-colour, 4 colour
Now increacingly popular and available, digital printing can use standard CMYK process printing and some are fancy enough to use pantone process.
Raster have a resolution, measured in pixels or dots, image quality is related to image size. Raster graphics are very used for digital photography, scanning and video. JPG is the most common raster graphic used today.
Vector graphics are resolution independant, mathematic formulas that desrcibe the shape of a line, this technique allows graphics made in vector to be resized larger or smaller without quality loss (or gain). Vector graphics are commonly used with clipart, logos, and all fonts are actually a system that used vector graphics.
CMYK, RGB, HSB, Lab, Pantone, Greyscale, Black and white.
Spot and Process
Bleed, edge to edge printing
Trapping
Systems: Picas, Points, in, cm, mm, %, pixels, em, en
Resoultion: ppi,
Embedding, typefaces, leading, tracking, baseline
Books, pamphlets, zines, trifolds, and even double sided documents often require certain attibutres. Multipage printing has many possible considerations including: Binding, page numbering, impositioning, perfect bound, spine, spread, signatures,
Fully Formatted Disk: Everything the printer needs to reproduce the graphic including the desk top publishing file (Illustrator, InDesign, Quark) as well as any fonts, images, and additional files needed. Often a print ready PDF can be included.
Prepping to send to a printer.
Ask your printer if they accept your prefered format & which version of the program they can handle iif necessary (TIFF & JPG have no version).
The following section goes over the settings needed when sending certain types of files to a printer. Standard resolutions, comour modes, compression settings, etc.
Baseline |
The (usually) invisible line that letters line up along. On school paper the baselines are lightblue to make writing guided and more straight. Lowercase letters with decenders like g and y usually fall below the baseline in most fonts. | |
Bitmap |
Originally; A map of binary units. Now a generic term for any raster image. | |
Bleed |
Also known as edge to edge printing. Documents which have coloured ink spanning all the way to the edge of a page. The bleed area in a print file usually extends 1/8 - 1/4 of an inch past the edges of the paper size. This bleed area is later trimmed off. This also means the size of paper being printed on must be larger than the page size and the bleed combined | |
Choke |
A technique to prevent gaps from occurring in spot colour areas, | |
Clipping Mask |
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CMYK |
The abbreciated four colours used for standard printing. Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. Also known as the process colours, 4 colour printing and Full Colour printing. | |
Creep |
The extra paper that is trimmed off that occurs as pages folder together in saddlestich productions. The thickness of each page pushes the middlemost pages further out, causing a 'V' shape. After a book is boundd this excess | |
Crop Marks |
short Lines Parallel and Perpendicular to the page used to indicate where to trim the paper to it's final size. Often used with bleeds. | |
Digital Press |
A printng press that can complete short or long print runs directly from digital files. | |
DTP |
Desk Top Publishing. Usually using software like InDesign, Quark Xpress, MSPublisher, Corel Draw, and PageMaker. Though some people produce readily printable documents in Illustrator, Photoshop, Word, PowerPoint and many other programs. It all depends on what your printer can handle, be it a company or a device. Call them up if you're sending it out or read the manual, or visit the website if you're printing in-house. DTP software is designed to combine various file types including the most common text, raster and vector images. | |
Dye Cut |
A method of cutting interesting paper shapes other than rectangles and squares. | |
Dye Line |
The line in a digital document that indicates where the dyecut will be made. | |
Frequency |
In print, usually refers to the angle of the screen a colour will print at. By using different angles to print each colour, unwanted patterns can be prevented. | |
Full Colour |
Images that simulate the full visible spectrum of humans. Unlike greyscale or monochromatic images. | |
Halftone |
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Imposition |
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In-House |
Printing occurring on a nearby printer. A document sent directly to a printing device. | |
Knockout |
Shape areas that are not printed on to allow other colours to print alone. Preventing overprinting of two colours. If yellow and cyan are printed in the same area the result would be green, where if the yellow was 'knocked out' of a certain area, that area would appear cyan in the final result, but the surrounding area would appear green. | |
Large Format |
Poster sized printouts. Usually done with specialty printers called plotters. | |
Leading |
The distance between baselines. Usually 120% the font size. Should be smaller with Large type and increaced leading with fine print. | |
Moire |
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Offset Press |
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Overprint |
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Pantone |
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Perfect Bound |
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Pica |
1/6 of an inch. | |
Press Proof |
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Printing Plate |
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Point |
1/72 of an inch. | |
Printing |
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Process Colour |
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Raster |
aka Bitmap, a more genera term for all pixel based digital images like jpg, gif and tiff. | |
Registration |
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Resolution |
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Rich Black |
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RIP |
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Saddle Stitch |
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Screen Angles |
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Service Bureau |
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Separations |
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Press Signature |
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Slug |
An area surrounding outside a document that will be trimmed off later that contians information about the document. | |
Spine |
The middle of a book or book like document. The spine is the center of two pages. | |
Spot Colour |
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Spread |
Two pages that are designed to face each other in a book like publication. | |
Tracking |
The horizontal spacing of Type | |
Trapping |
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Typefaces |
Commonly refered to as 'font'. The style or look of a set of characters. | |
Vector |
Mathamatical formula that describes a line. | |
Watermark |
A light image that appears behind type. Some watermarks can only be read if the material is held up to the light. |