MCK Design & Print musings

Custom cutting

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 16:27:57 +1200

We have recently purchased a programmable cutting machine (Blackcat Cougar 24"). I have been using this machine as a simple die-cutting machine and have also experimented with embossing.

What can it do?

We have produced some diecut business cards, some table-talkers, and some food labels, to name just a few. We first print the material, usually on card, on our digital press and then put it through the cutting machine to be cut out.

Advantages

It is great for prototyping designs and for doing short runs of diecutting material. Large quantities can be handled on a traditional diecutting machine, but at the very least, concepts can be proven. We can also diecut larger sheets than most traditional diecutting machines which gives us more flexibility in design.

Disadvantages

Everything that needs to be cut has to be stuck down on a cutting mat. The surface is tacky so it works well—until the paper dust makes the surface non-tacky. Then you need to wash the mat and possibly reapply some adhesive.

The process is manual. You need to align the card so it is square on the cutting mat; then move the cutting so it will begin cutting in the right place relative to your print. There is a laser dot on the cutting machine for alignment so I print a dot on the material to be cut so as to help alignment. Even so, there is a lot of nudging of the cutting head to get it exactly in the right position. You can align three corners but this is even more time consuming.

Elements of Typographic Style

Fri, 11 May 2012 16:49:46 +1200

Cover design

We have a produced a second edition of the “best selling” booklet Elements of Typographic Style. This updated version explains the various fundamental principles of good typography—and why we have them.

If you ever wanted to improve your typographic skills, or even just wanted to know the origin of some of its conventions, then this is the booklet for you. Jam packed with useful information within its 32 pages.

Simple, straightforward and free. Email Graeme McKinstry if you would like a copy.

Page margins

Self publishing

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:03:33 +1200

Before digital printing made short prints runs affordable, it was cost prohibitive to publish your own book. Now, armed with a great idea, you can produce your own book without having to mortgage the house.

We have helped quite a few Dunedin authors publish their books. Some like Huberta Hellendorn’s Madonna in the Suitcase go on to national success; others like Patearoa at War by Jim Sullivan reach a more modest audience (even if the initial print run of 100 was sold out).

Some observations that may prove helpful if you intend to self-publish:

You need somebody to give you an honest appraisal of your book. You might think the idea is wonderful but what do other people think?
How big is the audience for the book? You will probably need to be able to sell (or give away!) at least 50 copies to make the unit cost reasonable.
We would prefer to layout the book—we are passionate about good typography and design and have seen too many books spoiled by bad or mediocre typography. If you have a good knowledge of typography and can find you way around InDesign okay then you may be in a position to attempt the layout yourself. However, we would still love to help you with type choice, page sizes, etc.
Colour or black-and-white? Colour looks better but costs more money. What about a mixture of both?
Scanning? If you are using old photographs then you will want to get the best out of them. Again, we have seen perfectly good books ruined by not being particular about this.
Paper size and paper choice. This can make a big difference to the cost and feel of the book.
Cover. You need a compelling cover—despite the old adage of not judging a book by its cover. Don’t try and do this yourself.
ISBN number and barcode. We can help you with this. You will need to send 2 copies to the National Library in Wellington as part of this.
Book launch. You want a big book launch and invite family and friends. Make sure you have plenty of copies of the book for sale.

This might seem daunting but don’t be put off. We are happy to advise and help you through all the necessary steps.

Smarter catalogue production

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 15:05:27 +1200

The Trends Collection for 2011 has recently been published—a catalogue that we were intimately involved with. It runs to 240 pages and features the whole product range—hundreds of products in total.

Andrew spent a lot of time on the design, and together with the rest of the team from MCK and with Jim and Pat from Tuapeka Print, the whole project was brought home. It involved lots of product photography and scanning (Wolfgang would take one photo of a product that was to appear in multiple colours and then colour “correct” to get the other product colours), lots of clearcutting by everyone, and some fantastic Photoshop work by Andrew to combine shots of the models (which he organized) with various products.

Catalogues of this size never come to us whole, and take months from start to finish. In previous years a lot of time was spent shuffling pages around when products were added, moved or deleted. Products are not featured the same way in the catalogue—some will have a page to themselves; others will have 1/2 or even 1/3 of a page. We wanted to avoid the hassle of constantly rearranging pages this year as, not only does this cost the client unnecessarily, but it is also extremely tedious.

InDesign (as of version 5) finally allows pages of different sizes to appear in one document. We setup templates for 1/3, 1/2 and full pages. To give the design maximum freedom we didn’t want the designer (Andrew) to worry about where the product would appear on a page, or whether it would appear on a left or right-hand page. We also wanted to remove the drudgery of keeping track of page numbers, table of contents and indexing.

Example 1/2 page without page elements

To collate the catalogue we created a PDF file from InDesign and then I turned to my expertise in TeX to paginate. TeX treated each page as if it was just a box and would set about adding as many boxes to a page as would fit (2 1/2 pages, 3 1/3 pages). The headings, page numbers, sidebars and section text were all added automatically by LaTeX.

Example page with page elements added

Title information, indexing information, etc., was added to an invisible layer in the InDesign file and exported as a tagged text file. Later on this tagged file was read back into LaTeX to be used in collating the pages.

The index and each section’s mini table of contents were also handled automatically which saved a lot of tedium, as well as being more accurate.

More musings on our Canon ipf8300 inkjet

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:23:38 +1300

We have had our printer for several months now, and have had a chance to get better at colour matching. Most of us at MCK have a prepress background and are as confident in CMYK colour as RGB. Recently we had a printing job that involved producing 8up imposition proofs for two catalogues that were to be offset printed in China. Altogether we printed close to 200m of proofs.

We used Preps to do the imposition (perfect binding) and produced a single PDF for printing. Adobe Acrobat Pro was used for printing with the pages being 900mm x 640mm.

Some observations:

We used colour bars to check the colour accuracy. If we chose the wrong settings when printing these would be way off and so they were a quick visual check to see if we had everything set correctly.
Occasionally some characters would print incorrectly or even disappear. This had also happened on a previous job as well. I am not sure whether the fault lies with Acrobat or the Canon print driver. The solution: use the Print Production Tools in Acrobat, specifically Flattener Preview, to convert all the type to outlines before printing.
The transparency effects introduced a very slight colour variation as compared to the background. For example, the colour of the background affected by a drop shadow would be slightly different to the rest of the background. It was very subtle and not a problem for this job where the emphasis was mainly on making sure that everything was where it should be rather than perfectly accurate colour. It was, however, annoying to a perfectionist like myself, but try as I might, I couldn’t tweak any settings to make it go away. Has any one else solved this problem?
Most used ink: Gray, followed by Red then (photo) Black
Even with the Ink menu warning that the Black was low we were still able to produce 65 A1s before it insisted on replacing the Black ink.
We never had any problems with the printer. Funnily enough, inkjet printers perform better the more they are used—when not used the nozzles tend to become blocked.

We have also produced quite a few watercolour prints on Lexjet Velvet Rag. This is a beautiful material that is available in large sheets.

The watercolour prints were more difficult than the proofing job (above) as we had previously printed the same artwork using our Epson 9600 and on Epson Watercolor paper, and so we had to try and match colours with these prints.

Despite this, we found that, in general, that with the new Canon printer there was much less work needed in Photoshop to tweak the colour to try and match the original artwork. (Watercolour paper tends to soak up the ink and so it much harder to maintain vibrant colours). On the Epson we use an old Colorgate RIP; on the Canon we are just using the standard print driver.

With Lexjet Gloss Canvas we found we could get an amost perfect colour match with the same print on eSatin, which is a close match with Epson Premium Lustre.

So far, then, we are very happy with the Canon ipf8300. It has run without a glitch and produced some fantastic results. Initially I was skeptical about how well it work without a separate RIP but there have been very few problems and none which can’t be worked around.

iBooks

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 11:42:18 +1300

With Apple’s announcement of a new iBook format and a new authoring application, I thought I might offer an opinion on how I see this playing out.

Unusually, I wll offer my conclusion at the begininning: that this is an opening salvoe in what promises to be a protracted war.

As to why I think like this:

Apple has a long and distinguished history of kick-starting whole new areas only for others to come in later and gain a majority share. Think: popularizing WIMP (Windows, Icons, Pulldown Menus) interfaces, desktop publishing, music (in this I think that Apple’s ability to get the major music studios together is more of an achievement than the iPod itself), smartphones and Tablet computers. The only areas where they have managed to hold on to the majority of the market are with Tablets (for now), iPods and, to a far lesser extent, desktop publishing. This is not to minimize their achievments but just to put it in some sort of perspective.
The new iBook format has some glaring omissions, most obviously in that it only works with iPads. My guess is that some problems will be addressed in the near future: not being able to view iBooks on an Apple Mac seems particularly egregious.
There are still big holes in the implementation: typographic controls are still limited (e.g., no decent line breaking algorithm, no hanging punctuation); setting mathematics hasn’t been addressed, etc. The iBook Author application isn’t aimed at people who care about the detail; only the obvious and flashy areas are suitably addressed.
The only way for the new iBook format to gain widespread traction is to open up the format, or at least fold the improvements back into the (ePub) standard. I believe that this will happen, but as to when, well, with Apple that is anyone’s guess. As it stands now, iBook seems to be a vehicle for Apple to sell iPads. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but if I was a major textbook publisher I would certainly be interested in this announcement, but I also would be leery of putting all my publishing eggs in one proprietary basket.

So, does this mean that we won't be using the new iBook format here at MCK? Not all all—we will defiintely be experimenting and converting some publications into the new format. However, we will also have to look at catering to other platforms that the new format doesn’t deal with.

The real key here is “patience.” As I used to tell my children when they were younger, patience means “to wait.” iBook, or its successor/competitor, will undoubtedly get better in time.

New inkjet printer

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:24:18 +1300

We have finally taken delivery of a new Canon iPF8300 inkjet printer. This adds to our existing Epson 9600 which is still providing sterling service.

The iPF8300 prints up to 44" wide (1118mm) and up to 18m (yes metres) long, which is similar to the Epson. However, where it improves on the Epson is in the number of ink colours: 12 as compared to 7. The extra inks are Red, Green, Blue and an extra light grey, which should allow for a far wider colour gamut. It also has two Black inks (matte and gloss)—which one is used depends on the paper being printed on—and is chosen automatically. It is also faster, the inks are more scratch resistant, and it improves greatly on the “bronzing” problem when printing black-and-white prints.

We have also taken the opportunity to get some new papers, including a Gloss canvas, an eSatin paper and sheets of Velvet Rag paper (1200mm x 900mm).

Trials of the printer are continuing, but so far we are pretty impressed. Wolfgang is tweaking colour setting to try and match existing watercolour prints, and I am experimenting with settings for getting the most accurate colour from CMYK images.

Observations so far: black-and-white prints out of the box are fantastic with no colour casts; printing of 16-bit Photoshop files gives an impressively wide colour range; and the gradations are very smooth.

Some basic typesetting principles

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 22:14:37 +1300

Having typeset many books in my professional life, and having taught courses on word processing and typesetting (not necessarily related), I have realized that there are some basic principles that are often overlooked. The first of these is the most important.

Line length

This would be the most important thing to get right and is almost always made too wide if you don’t get some advice.

The eyes should be able to scan a whole line in one sweep without moving your head. Lines which are too long are tiring to read.

This means, in practical terms, that a line should be no wider than 70 characters wide. For 10pt type this will equate to around 12cm.

The initial complaint will be that for many documents the type block looks too small for the large paper size (A4 or US letter). However, this principle is so important that you should increase your margins and “just go with it.” White space is an important aid to readability.

MCK Blog

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 19:19:18 +1300

This is my first blog entry. We maintain our own site using Silverstripe and adding a Blog module is relatively straightforward. I plan on adding some more interesting posts in the coming weeks.