Today I’m opening a new tab on the blog. I’ll use it to post various tutorials I find interesting. The first post will be a tutorial about using broken lines on Illustrator. Dashes of Stroke Secrets. from Jeff Witchel on Vimeo. I think it’s very interesting, not because I didn’t know about it, but because it gave me many […]
Clothbound is a cover dressed with cloth Clothbound book with 2-colour hot-foil stamping Notice the details on the cloth Leather-bound is a cover dressed with leather (original or imitation). Leather-bound cover with gold hot-foil stamping In both cases, the beauty’s in the material. When using these materials for book covers we mainly want […]
Hello again! During the summer, the Greek sea and sun kept us apart for a while… along with the work we had after the vacations. But I’m back now, so let’s go on… Today we’ll talk about many-fold printouts. The main difficulty in this type of printed media is – what else? – folding. And […]
Adhesive is the binding of a leaflet or book by gluing 16 or 8-page signatures on the back of the book (e.g. school books are bound this way). However, this type of binding is not very solid. There is a quite powerful glue that can make them better (PUR) but it’s not widely used in […]
Each book, magazine or leaflet with over six pages is sent out to be bound after it’s printed. There are four types of binding: Saddle Stitching Adhesive Thread-sealing Spiral SADDLE STITCHING When we say stitching, we mean binding the printout with two metallic staples on its back. There’s simple saddle stitching and saddle stitching with […]
What we have to check before handing in a project We all want our projects to be printed out exactly as we see them on our screens. However, many times, the printouts are far from what we have expected, without it always being the printers’ fault. In any case, we should first be able to […]
Some media is usually printed in two or more languages, but remain otherwise unaltered. In this case we can be economical by printing once in four-colour and then use an extra zinc-plate for each language. There are some things we should be aware of before designing this kind of files. First of all, in order […]
What is Metal FX technology? It’s the printing of multiple metallic colours using only one extra ink. This technology has been used in Greece for the last three years by our company https://www.lyhnia.com and is indeed really interesting. It’s a process through which millions of metallic colours can be printed, with the use of only one […]
What is overprinting? Overprinting refers to the process of printing one colour on top of another, without the latter being covered and without holes being made on the background e.g. black letters on orange background. The black colour is printed over the orange background. When and why should we use it? Indesign and Xpress […]
On a previous post we mentioned the issue of transferring Greek monotonic texts from Quark versions older than 6.5 to any kind of modern program. It’s time to talk about the same issue but in the case of polytonic texts. The transfer of a polytonic text from a Quark 6.5 or older can be accomplished […]
Some of us, who’ve worked in the graphic design field for a while, had started with the Quark Xpress on Macintosh. So, many of our files are created in Quark Xpress 6.5. there comes a time though that we need to use texts from Quark Xpress 6.5 in other programs like Ingesign, Quark 7, 8 […]
Many times, we receive PDFs we have to open and edit, but we don’t have the fonts. The solution for this problem is quite simple, as long as the received PDF has the fonts installed. On Illustrator, we create a file the same size as the PDF and we choose place to pdf as link. […]
On the previous post, we talked about the basic solid-colour pantone palettes. Of course, pantone also provides four-colour palettes: the CMYK pantone palette (coated/uncoated). (on programs they’re referred to as “pantone process coated/uncoated”) Pantone CMYK colour palettes Those palettes let us choose a colour by giving us the exact analogies we have to use to […]
According to the poll, colour accuracy is what most of us are concerned with when it comes to printouts. Indeed, perfect colour accuracy depends on many factors and that’s why it’s one of the biggest printing issues. But let’s start with the basics. How can we tell if colours are accurate? By checking on the […]
Today we’ll talk about proper PDF export. As I mentioned on the previous post, it’s essential to set up our file in the correct format. The file dimensions must be the exact ones we want our final trimmed product to have. We must also leave an at least 3mm bleed edge and check all photos […]
What are digital hard-copy proofs? They are digital printouts on a standard inject printer, which is regularly calibrated, so that it can print with high colour accuracy (almost 100%). What are certified digital hard-copy proofs for? In the case of offset printing, colour performance depends on various factors, like whether the file has been properly […]
