There is somewhat of a mystique about printing techniques that all designers must wade through. There’s always a learning curve and often times several games of trial and error. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a reference to minimize the quirks associated with printing? The Media Collective thinks so, and I agree.
We started looking for a reference book that we could use for our own design work at The Media Collective. Once we found there wasn’t one we were happy with we thought it’d be a great idea to do our own.
We really wanted something that was compact and included a lot of the questions we had about printing, as well as reference material. There’s a lot of advice around about different areas of printing, but we wanted to see it in the flesh. For example, we had questions like “we know using a rich black with 40% cyan is often recommended by printers, but does this give you a black that is too cool in colour?”. So in the handbook we’ve got some examples for comparison.
We haven’t gone overboard on the printing or size, and we’ve really filled the pages. We really wanted to make the handbook affordable to everyone, including students.
We had to ask our printers to keep a careful an eye on this project. We were doing a lot of things that are not recommended to see how they turned out. So blacks with CMYK values of 100/100/100/100, tiny text sizes, very fine lines and other things too were all included.
Former intern at UnderConsideration LLC.
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FPO (For Print Only), is a division of UnderConsideration, celebrating the reality that print is not dead by showcasing the most compelling printed projects.
FPO uses Fonts.com to render Siseriff and Avenir Next.
FPO is run with Six Apart’s MovableType
All comments, ideas and thoughts on FPO are property of their authors; reproduction without the author’s or FPO’s permission is strictly prohibited
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UnderConsideration is a graphic design firm generating its own projects, initiatives, and content while taking on limited client work. Run by Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin Vit in Bloomington, IN. More…
blogs we publish
Brand New / Displaying opinions and focusing solely on corporate and brand identity work.
Art of the Menu / Cataloguing the underrated creativity of menus from around the world.
Quipsologies / Chronicling the most curious, creative, and notable projects, stories, and events of the graphic design industry on a daily basis.
products we sell
Flaunt: Designing effective, compelling and memorable portfolios of creative work.
Brand New Conference videos / Individual, downloadable videos of every presentation since 2010.
Prints / A variety of posters, the majority from our AIforGA series.
Other / Various one-off products.
events we organize
Brand New Conference / A two-day event on corporate and brand identity with some of today's most active and influential practitioners from around the world.
Brand Nieuwe Conference / Ditto but in Amsterdam.
Austin Initiative for Graphic Awesomeness / A speaker series in Austin, TX, featuring some of the graphic design industry's most awesome people.
also
Favorite Things we've Made / In our capacity as graphic designers.
Projects we've Concluded / Long- and short-lived efforts.
UCllc News / Updates on what's going at the corporate level of UnderConsideration.
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