Design for Print: Stand Out with Specialty Printing Techniques

1. 4 Color vs. Spot Color Printing: All right. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the first lesson for design for print. Thanks for stopping by. So, I'm just going to jump right into this very introductory stuff just so I know that we're all on the same page, and then we get into fun things like print processes and split fountains and edge coloring and all that jazz. But basically, the first thing we're going to be talking about here are the two different types of print processes which are 4 color, also known as CMYK printing, versus spot color or sometimes known as pantone color printing. I think the easiest way to describe the differences and when one is more applicable than the other is to note the strengths and weaknesses because although they're similar in theory, they're pretty different in application. Of course it's putting ink on paper, but the way you could do that could be drastically different. So 4 color printing, which is sometimes known as CMYK or full-color, is what most people are used to, even if they don't know it. Like your inkjet at home uses 4 color; printing photographs, movie posters, magazines and borders, all that stuff is printed using CMYK. So, like 95% of the things that you see that are printed use this method. Like either offset, which is huge production machines or digitally, which is like your inkjet at home, for instance. We'll get into that a little bit more in depth later. But with CMYK printing, basically, there are four colors, and I have an example of that right here. They are cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. It's the combination of these colors overlapping each other which is what gives you your printed piece. Typically speaking, it's much more economical and cheaper to run CMYK, but the results also vary quite a bit from printer to printer. So, when you make up for cost effectiveness can sometimes lead to color shifts and the end result. But to illustrate what I'm talking about here, this is an image that I would have and I might send this to my printer, and my printer will print it with no problem, and it will print using CMYK and you might not even know it's doing that. But I went in here and manually separated these colors to give you a little bit more of an understanding of how this might work. So black is on top here and then we have cyan, and then we have magenta and then we have yellow. As I'm taking them away, you can see what I'm talking about how the colors overlap to form your final image. If I took away black and cyan, you might have a cool duo tone here, which you could do if you wanted to save a little bit of money. But all four is what your inkjet would use. If I get really close in here, things get a little weird, but if you had a magnifying glass for instance and looked at your printed piece on paper, you would see a whole bunch of dots that wouldn't make any sense like what you're seeing here. It's a lot like if you look up at a billboard, if you get close to a billboard and look at it, you're like how does this even make an image? It makes no sense. But then when you get far away it does. Similar principle. But as you can see as I start taking things away, the dots form less and less colors because the overlapping is what creates your image and then as I get further away, it starts to make more sense. That's how CMYK printing works as a general way. Now, the other process we're going to color here is spot color printing. Generally speaking, the Wikipedia definition of this is any color generated by a non-standard offset ink such as like a metallic or a fluorescent ink or a spot varnish. I like to define spot color as any ink that you have to hand mix and reference a Pantone book for, because when you're using spot colors, the colors are much more accurate because everybody is referencing the same book, which is the book that I have here, well, one of the books that you can use to reference. This is a Pantone solid uncoded book and it's what I used to reference a lot of the colors for my screen print jobs. But for example like a pantone, this pretty pink Pantone 698 U, it's going to be 698 U no matter who uses it because we're all referencing the same books. That is very important when you get into referencing for brand colors, like Coke red has to be Coke red. I don't know what it is. They might even have their own pantone at this point. But if you're ordering a letterpress or screen print job, the vast majority of the time, it will be a spot color print. That's just how it goes. So, I have an example of a spot color job that I submitted right here. This is for actually the same exact job that you just saw, but this was a letterpress job. It's two colors, 7472 U was one of them, and 18 AU was the other. I ordered like 100 of these and they did 100 prints of just this one color, they laid them all down at one time and then they did 100 of this color and they laid them all down one time. Now, this print actually uses a specialty printing technique called overprinting, which we will cover more. By making the ink slightly more transparent and printing over a bottom color, you form this third color right here. That's called overprinting but I'm a huge fan of that print process technique. So to wrap this up here the main takeaway I want to note for your project is CMYK printing is more economical and cost effective way for printing, but can often have varying results from screen to your printed piece and from printer to printer. But if you're not picky, it can sometimes be the way to go, especially if you're on a budget. But with spot color printing, you're typically going to get a more accurate, more vibrant results but you're going to have a smaller color range to pick from. For this project, we're going to be focusing almost exclusively on spot color printing because that is where a lot of the specialty printing techniques come in, it's the way that you specify them and the way that you talk about them, but I just wanted you to have an understanding of both in case you needed them. 2. Letterpress & Silkscreen Printing: All right. Hello everybody, welcome to the next section where we're going to be talking a little bit about, Letterpress and Screen printing. This is going to be kind of a pretty broad overview, sort of like a highlight reel. To start it off, I don't want to really get into the history of it too much, but I think it is important to give a little bit of a background on how this stuff works. So, letterpress machines came along around 1450. They were originally used as high-volume newspaper and book printing machines. This is a picture of a press room. I'm not really sure what they're printing, but it looks like they're printing a lot of it. The general gist of how letter pressing works is, ink is put onto a plate which is assembled inside the letterpress machine, and then papers fed, one at a time, and the ink is pressed into the paper via the plate, giving an impression to the paper, which is often referred to as bite. Here's a little video of that process happening. This particular machine is moving pretty fast. But I'll try and explain what's going on here. The paper's obviously coming from the bottom here, being fed into this section right here, which is what is giving the impression. You can't really see it right now, you get a glimpse a little bit, but right there is the plate which is what is pressing into the paper, which is laying right here on the bed. These two rollers are moving very rapidly, are collecting ink from up top here, a smooth coating. You're actually coating this metal right here, and then the ink rollers roll over it, and then they roll over your plate, which gives you a fresh coat each time your plate is pressed in with the paper. But the impression that you get via letterpress is often referred to as bite. The more impression, the more bite. It's kind of like what gives letterpress it's tactile and sought after effect, in terms of it's tactility in your hands, and you can't really get it with a stamp. You're literally pressing into the paper. But an interesting fact about bite actually is, you might arguably say it's what saved the letterpress, and partially what caused the recent revival, because you can achieve these deep impressions that look really cool. But in it's time, like during that press room time, that old picture that we saw this one, this bite would probably cause one of those print makers to shutter. It was actually kind of taboo to get that. They wanted to leave as little of a printers foot mark as possible. But as you can see here, in this Compass Box Whiskey Co, that's a little bit more what you would call like a kiss impression. You can't really see it, it's there, but it's not super apparent. It still has a little bit of a tactile quality to it, but it's not this like pressed into a cotton paper, as what I think a lot of letterpress people are going after now. That's just kind of like a general overview of letterpress, I'm sure we'll talk about it more as we get into this specialty printing technique stuff, but I just wanted to give you a general gist. So, now we'll move on to screen printing. Now, screen printing is essentially a big frame with mesh tightly glued over top of it, that acts as a stencil. Like, you're running ink over top of this stencil, which blocks out certain parts of your image, and let's certain parts through. That's how this whole process works. This section right here will let ink through, and the emulsion which is what you use to block out the parts that you don't want ink to go through, is what creates the image on your poster. Now, here's an example of that process kind of going on. This is the Mama Sauce crew printing the junk food calendar. But as you can see, each one is put down on a bed, ink is run over it one at a time, it's removed and let to dry, collected and then the process repeated. This was a four-color job, so they had to do this process each time, for however many total sheets we printed. But here's the last color going down. So, they had done three colors so far, and then this is the last color, black, going down. But the emulsion is keeping certain parts of the ink up, and letting certain parts of the ink through, and that is how you achieve your final result, by layering ink on top of each other. Now, a few things to keep in mind with these print processes, I just want to give you some highlights. Both of these printing processes use spot color to specify the colors. So, as you saw by the video, inks for these two methods are typically mixed by hand and laid down one at a time on the paper. So, when you're designing your business card, keep in mind, the more colors, the more cost. Each time you add a color, you're creating more work. You're creating more work to the cost to mix the color, and then to lay it down, plate cost, or screen cost in the instance of screen printing. So, sometimes, part of the charm is achieving as much as you can with this little color, sometimes. More colors aren't necessarily always better. Another thing to keep in mind is you don't get proofs typically, with these two methods. There's so much up front setup time. It's just like due to the nature of like the needs to register the plates, and the screens, and mix inks, and just clean up and all that. It makes creating process practically impossible. So, there's the element of trust and experience that kind of goes into this. You can print out roughs on your home computer, and indefinitely make sure all your ducks are in a row. But you won't get a peek at the finished, finished result until all of them are done at once, unless you have the ability to press check with a printer, which is always awesome. That's when you pretty much go into the studio, and you watch this stuff that it's just coming down to make sure it's exactly how you want it. So, sometimes picking a local print shop can be a good idea, unless you're confident in the printer that you're working with. Always helps too. So, the other thing is, there's a rather large cost difference between letterpress and screen print. Again, this is typically speaking, letterpress is going to be more costly until you get into the really high volume stuff. Since the letterpress process is really super labor-intensive, minimums normally tend to be much higher, and the pre unit cost doesn't tend to pay off until you get into the thousands of units, roughly speaking. Screen print is for shorter runs, and tend to be a little bit more cost-effective. But again, you lose that tactile nature of the printed piece, like, you don't get the impression, which is what a lot of people are after with the letterpress avenue. There are other considerations that are great about letter or about screen printing, that I'll touch on a little bit more especially during the budget section. Like, you can gang up sheets. It's much easier to print larger when it comes to screen printing, because the frames are generally a little bit less expensive, and easier to make larger, whereas, you typically are a little bit more limited on the size of sheet you can get, which is determined by the letterpress machine you have. So, I don't know, sometimes I think Heidelbergs are limited to like, 22 by 28 inch sheets, whereas this you could go like 28,40 by just getting a larger frame. But it's good to just check with the printer that you're going with to see what their limitations are with the equipment that they have. Next thing to keep in mind, is that screen printing tends to handle large floods of ink much better than letterpress. Because the nature of the way letterpress is done, you're basically pressing into the paper. To get even coverage when you're pressing in like that, with via a plate, is kind of tough. Some people seek that splotchy effect that letterpress can give, but achieving even floods of ink over large areas is very difficult with letterpress, and much easier with screen print. Hence, why 18 by 24 inch posters, gig posters especially, are much more common place to screen printing. Because the process of letterpress is basically pressing like a stamp, where screen printing, you can let much more ink through by varying degrees of mesh. Some have really tight meshes which don't let as much ink through, but if you want like a really opaque even flood, you can get a mesh that it isn't quite so tight knit, and it'll let more ink through, and you'll get a very opaque coverage. The last thing that I kind of want to touch on as sort of a general tip, between these two methods, is screen printing on dark substrates is a good idea. It's a very redeeming quality about screen printing that I don't think, well, I shouldn't say this, but I don't think I have seen utilized quite so much. Because I found one of the best parts of screen printing more so than any other printing process, is it's ability to print light on dark colored papers. You can letterpress on dark papers, but you normally won't get the same opaque floods of color or vibrancy that you'll get with screen printing. This is an example of letterpressing on dark-colored paper. This left-hand side right here is one pass. So, the letterpress impressed white on black paper once, and then the right-hand side is it twice, they just did it twice. As you can see, it's letting a lot of the black through, it's not very vibrant. It actually even has a little bit of a blue hue to it. It's splotchy and it's just via the nature of the process. So now, if you're going for this, it's actually kind of a cool technique. But if you want an opaque white, like this, on black paper, screen printing might be the way to go. So, that's a general overview of these stuff, and a couple tips that I've picked up along the way. The next section we're going to be talking about offset and digital printing. If this was a little bit quick, we're going to be covering more of this stuff and more techniques in the specialty printing technique section. But I just wanted to give you kind of an overview of how this stuff works in general. So, we'll see you in the next section 3. Offset & Digital Printing: All right. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the next section where we're going to be talking a little bit about digital and offset printing. Now, offset and digital printing are really pretty similar processes and achieve really similar results with the biggest differences being more apparent when it comes to price and minimum quantities. Offset printing is being the larger production machines like we have here on the right, and the digital printing normally being smaller at home, inkjet and laser jet printers like we have here on the left. Both are printed using CMYK. But generally speaking, offset printers are reserved for jobs with much higher quantities. This is because offset printing works by transferring ink from a plate to a rubber sheet, that's what you see going on in here which then rolls the ink onto the paper. So, this is the process more or less of CMYK. Looks like this is even bit more intricate. They have some red which is probably maybe like a spot color, and that doesn't look like straight up cyan but the general process is similar. So, like I showed in the last lesson, a separate plate would be made for each like cyan, yellow, magenta, and black plus any specialty inks. But it has a more upfront setup time, but you can crank up like a lot of jobs much quicker and higher quality, typically speaking, than digital printing. Here's a video of that process going down. It's not quite as alluring as what we saw with the letterpress and screen printing, it's all going on inside that machine, but it is printing a lot of stuff. Now, digital printing, which does not use plates to transfer ink to the paper, this results in a quicker turnaround time at lower cost. But typically, there is a little bit of a loss in some quality, and there's also an inability to do any specialty printing inks and things like that. Now, there have been tremendous advances in digital printing. But just as a general way of saying this, offset normally has better end results than digital printing does. Now, a few things to keep in mind here, some pros and cons of these two methods is that you can get proofs with digital and offset printing methods. In fact, digital is actually immediate proofs because what you're printing out is the finished result. So, dialing in results when it comes to digital printing is much easier than it is with an offset job. When you're running an offset, you'll normally get a digitally printed proof anyway, but it's just calibrated to appear as close to the offset results as possible. Then when they run it, you can press check and be there and stuff and it will all be running out one at a time. But with digital printing, you get immediate results that you can dial in exactly how you want. Digital printing is also extremely convenient and cost effective for short jobs, but out of all the printing methods, it's probably the most prone to subpar results. That's perhaps not the right term but just not extremely professional because these home printers are normally mass-produced and it's very dependent on the quality of the printer that you buy. You can get extremely accurate result via a digital printing, it just varies quite a bit from printer to printer that you get. There are also no specialty printing techniques available, it's just bare bones ink on paper. Digital printing does remain the best choice, though, for quick and low cost short run jobs definitely. Another thing to keep in mind is you can incorporate spot colors with offset but not with digital printing. When complete control is needed over your job and you have to be completely color accurate, before color process used for digital printing, you can't compete with traditional offset printers. So, color counts, you should definitely go for offset. There are digital printers that have a color printing options available, but they are on the side of almost like a specialty printing machine. So with digital printing, you might be able to get close, but if you have to specify a pantone spot color for a brand or something, offset is the way to go. Now, another thing is like we talked about offset jobs, like this is a huge production machine, they're normally reserved for quantities of 500 units and up. There's obviously wiggle room in this figure from printer to printer depending on who you talk to. But typically speaking, it won't be cost effective to run offset unless you're doing a ton of sheets. The printing quality will increase when you move to offset from digital. There are major cost effective benefits for running offset if you're doing multiple jobs at a time. In the next section that we go later on, we'll get into this more, the budget-minded printing section. But if you're printing cards especially, you can gang up jobs or put multiple designs on the same sheet, which is known as ganging up, and it will just translate into tremendous savings because you're running just highly efficient jobs that you don't really have to be mindful of how many colors you're printing, so you can do tons of different designs at the same time. As long as you're doing a lot of them, it's just tremendous savings. But ultimately, the choice of printing method will depend on the quality that you must have your volume demands, how much money you got, and really also time schedule. Digital printing at home is going to be extremely quick, you get it like in 15 seconds, whereas offset, you are at the whim of a printer schedule and this things take longer and if you're shipping and picking them up and cutting and trimming down. But I just wanted to give you a basic overview of these two methods. They aren't, in my opinion, as cool, you get super professional really good results with them. But in terms of the niche market and specialty printing techniques, letterpress and then screen printing and some of the other things that we talk about in a little bit are more of like have the wow factor so on. So, now that we have an understanding of this a little bit more and some ways of printing, we get into the juicy stuff in the next lesson which is specialty printing techniques. So, I'll see you there. 4. Paper & Printing Materials : All right. Welcome to the next section where we will be discovering the particulars of paper. Now, paper might not seem like that big of a deal. But it is a sea of possibilities and really what makes or breaks good print projects from unbelievable ones. It might not seem particularly exciting, but I think once I introduce some of the cool papers, you'll be able to really geek out over them. So there's a lot of content to cover. So we're going to be breezing through it a bit. But in the resources section, there'll be links for further investigation should you choose to do it. There is a ton to cover and unbelievable amount of paper. The first part of the paper that we're going to be talking about though is weight. Now, weight is again really intricate. There's a bunch of different ways to denote weight. There's a ton of weight determinations. But a majority of the time, papers are referred to as text or cover weight, which are these two, texts or cover. When they start to get heavier, you get into point denominations. But for the majority of the papers that I work with, they're either text or cover. Now, there are multiple differences as you see with these numbers here. These are pounds of paper. So, normally, this would be the thinnest paper weight that you could possibly get, a 16 pound bond. Then you're getting over here into 18 point card stock. But each one of these as you go down gets thicker, and then it moves up in rank. So it would be 28 pound bond, and then it would be 45 pound text. So 60 pound text is heavier than 45 pound text and so on. Twenty-two pounds cover is heavier than 192 pound text, very likely depending on the paper manufacturer. Now, when you get even heavier than cover, as when you get into like business card stock in card stock, this is starting to be referenced by points. A point refers to the thickness of an individual sheet of paper when measured with a micrometer. The thicker the paper, the higher the number. Really, you just have to get samples. Each paper manufacturer line has a different way of the way they weigh their own papers. The only tried and true method of determining the exact paperweight you need is to get a swatch book. You might get close guessing which again if you're not extremely picky, you might be okay with but, the only tried and true way is to get a swatch book. So I have a couple here that I had sitting around but as you can see there's, when you get a swatch book and realize there's 30 different shades of white, the decisions can start to become a little bit overwhelming but this is for instance a French pop-tone book. Inside this book, they have all the different colors available for this particular line along with all the different weights. So there's some thin weights, and then they get over into the heavier stuff on the bottom. But you can order things like these which are actually just sample books. They give you a couple of sheets of each color in each weight, and that way you print them out or mockup jobs if you need to. But they're really cost effective ways to get large varieties of paper. Now, if that's already not enough variation, we're going to move on to two different types of paper coating. Now, typically, we will be printing on uncoated paper. But if you print on coated paper, you can have a glossy finish which is extremely shiny, or you can have a matte finish which is still shiny but a little bit duller, and then there's luster, there's satin, which are all varying degrees in between those two. One thing to keep in mind with coated papers though is you can't write on it. Since these are coated and it's an unporous finish, it won't take ink. It will rub off. I want to know for second that there are standard applications to keep in mind. But rules were meant to be broken. You can certainly achieve like awesome results screen printing on a coated paper for instance. But I just think that noting, that it's not common and in order to do something like that, may require some finesse is important. But to even further add to the options of paper available, there are a plethora of textures and options to pick from. This is linen. That might be laid. There's just a ton of different ones that you can do from column, felt, laid, linen. Each one providing a different texture and vibe for your final finished piece. But I'm getting way out there, and I want to keep this video from going over an hour or so. I'm going to finish this talk up a little bit by talking about the most common papers used in letterpress, and screen print, and specialty design applications. There are an absolute ton of paper manufacturers out there, good for everything, but I think it's valuable to point out a few that I and many other designers use on a pretty regular basis for good results. So, the first one of those would be French paper Co. which is right here. They have a large selection of uncoated paper stocks in many varying weights that fit every application you can imagine. They're good for both screen print and letterpress. For color printing applications, they are really good all around. It's a go to for many designers. They produce all their papers via 100 percent hydroelectricity which is pretty cool. It's been like a standard for gig posters for many years. The second notable one that I want to touch on is for letterpress. That line is Crane's Lettra. It's an extremely porous, extremely thick, and extremely white. It's a perfect line for most letterpress applications. If you're going for an extremely deep bite into the paper, a top contender almost always is Crane's Lettra 220 pound cover. It's like a pillow. Another reason this paper works well is because a lot of times you can get a deep bite in thinner paper, but what ends up happening is it shows through the back. So, this is a particular instance of a letterpress job that I had done on 110 pound Crane's Lettra fluorescent white paper. It looks great on the front, and it's likely that it's going to be framed. But if it was a business card for instance, this would be a bomber on the back. It would take away from the polish of the business card because as you can see, it shows through and actually almost creates little valleys because the ink is causing the paper to warp. But there's just a ton. So this is a good example of how deep you can get into Crane's Lettra. It's pretty awesome. This is embossing and debossing which we will be talking about in the next session where we dive into the magic stuff which is specialty printing techniques. It's finally upon us. See you there. 5. Specialty Techniques I: At long last, we are at the specialty printing techniques. In this section, we're going to cover stamps, foil stamping, and embossing and debossing, split fountain printing, thermography, die cutting and that's only half. This is the first half of the two specialty printing techniques because the video is getting too long. Now, the first one up that we're going to be talking about is stamps, and I think stamps, as a whole, are widely underutilized. I have had just a tremendous amount of success using these especially for packaging and across many different mediums. In this particular instance, I was using them to print on cylindrical poster tubes. I couldn't figure out a way to do it. I got a stamp made up, and I just inked it and I rolled it over the poster tube, and it works great. I don't have to order a whole bunch upfront, it's not an added cost all at once. I can do them as I need them, it's extremely cost effective and very versatile. I like to consider stamps as the sleeper of print design. They have a great vintage finish and most of the time, you can even incorporate them as finishing touches on existing letterpress, or screen print designs. Like, for instance in this particular one, you could use this as a cost effective finish, like maybe this was, I'm not sure what this is, let's say this was like a one color letterpress design on like a really thick cranes letter, which would be relatively budget-minded. But then, in an effort to save a little money, you do a stamp, which is that splash of color on the top right, and you can do them as you need them, and it gives this authentic vintage feel, almost like a post office. I'm just a really big fan of that look and I really like it. There are even other things that you can do with stamps, like specialty printing inks. This is a particular instance with metallic inks, and I just kinda want to elaborate how cheap this particular this job would be to create. It would be so cost effective, you get that rubber stamp made for like 30 bucks. You get that paper and you cut it down yourself, and you make them as you need them. You're talking a $60-investment for an infinite amount of cards. It's really something to take into consideration when you're designing your business cards. They even have other inks like specialty inks for printing on polypropylene, or slippery surfaces like plastic. Really, I'll include more information in the resources section on this, but it's definitely something to check out. Now, the second one up that we're gonna be talking about is foil stamping. Now, foil stamping works by a heated dyes. It's basically fusing metallic foil onto the paper via heat. It's obviously metallic in nature. Before, it has some really awesome applications and it catches the light like in can. As you can see in this image, it's very reflective. You can get really great classy results like black, like shiny black on Matt Black, or the ever classy gold on white paper that always looks good. It's really classy, it's really bright. But some things to notice is foil stamping is always going to be 100 percent opaque. You won't really be able to do like half-tones and stuff with foil. It's like a 100 percent opaque stamp on there. It's really shiny, and in my particular opinion, too much of it can be a little bit overwhelming. In this instance, it looks good because it's really well done and it has a lot of balanced and stuff, but too much gold foil can be a little bit overwhelming. I mean, that's obviously a subjective thing that is just my taste, but something to keep in mind. Now, the third specialty technique we're going to be talking about here is embossing and debossing paper. Basically, they're synonymous with each other. In effect, embossing is pushing the paper up or raising the design out of the paper. As you can see here on the right hand side, it's pushing the design out of paper, and debossing is pushing the design into the paper. Much like a letterpress does, which actually, in fact, there's a technique used in letter pressing called a blind impression, which is you're basically hitting your paper with a letterpress without any ink on it, which creates this effect of like just an impression in the paper. But it's really classy and it sits in the cut, it's not over the top. Line impressions are a really good thing to use in your project. They're really nice touch, but some designers especially in for like poster and print application also get custom dyes made, which is this thing right here. I actually have one sitting on my desk. This is a desktop handheld embosser. You can get it to emboss or deboss. This design right here could go up or down, you can specify that with the person who makes your dye. But once you buy the actual embosser, you can get dyes made for it for a little bit cheaper, but this is also a great technique to use much like a stamp. In that there's a little bit of an upfront investment but you can make infinite of them, and you don't have to go into anybody to get them done. You can do them yourself as you need them, and you can incorporate it with a stamp or with screen-printing. It's a pretty cool technique, and actually a lot of designers, myself included, use it as like a sign off on their prints in the bottom right hand corner. Just because it sits in the cut, it's not real loud but it's like it's classy. It uses the the paper as a vehicle for the design, definitely something to consider it. It looks cool. Now, the next printing technique we have is thermography. Thermography is like an intricate process, that I don't completely understand, but it's basically, ink sheets are coated with a powdered polymer, and then they're heated up. They're sent through an oven for a few seconds, and it melts the polymer to produce this raised printing effect. I like to think of thermography in layman's terms is basically raised in printing, because the finish is the ink is raised off the paper, but it gives you almost like a foil stamp effect, but just not quite as shiny. As you can see here, this would be a gold on white but, as you can see, it's not quite as shin-ish. Now, the next specialty technique we have is one of my personal faves, and that is split fountain printing. Split fountain printing is essentially gradients, but doing it using a letter-presser screen-print method. Split fountains are done by using two or more colors of ink simultaneously, on the same screen or roller. So, this is a letterpress application of split fountain printing, but it creates this effect of a very smooth blend between two or more spot colors. This one to me looks like it's magenta and then this darker color over here, but you can do more than two, and they look really cool. They give this really cool finishing. Something to note with split color printing is that it's also relatively cost effective because, you're getting more colors but it's essentially a one color print. You're only running it once through the printer, you don't have to set up multiple colors, and multiple inks, and multiple plates, or multiple screen frames. It's just one, but you're putting more ink on it. So, it's a pretty cool technique to use to save a little bit of money, or if you just wanna do a gradient and couldn't figure out how to do it, it's a sneaky way, very cool technique. Now, our last technique for this first section is die cutting. The process of die cutting or of making steel rule die is pretty intricate, but the results are simple to understand. Die cutting is the is the process of cutting your paper into shapes, or cutting shapes out of it. As you can see, this is an example of a business card that was die cut at the end. So, it was printed, very likely, either on a large sheet or individually, and then a die cutter made of steel rule die and pressed it, almost like a cookie, like a cookie cutter, out of the paper. That's actually essentially exactly what it is. This is another one. But there are tons of applications a die cutting that you can do that are a little bit more cost effective, like you can do rounded corners, beveled corners. You can even do circular business cards and stuff. But anything that has a custom shape is going to be considered a custom die cut. Now, you can die cut things out of the interior of your business card, or you can add layers like in this particular instance it looks like they actually simulated a two-color process just by die cutting the interior of the top sheet. So, that's pretty cool that gives some really neat effects, and then here's another one where they just made their business card a die cut of their name. That's a pretty cool application. Now, I just wanted to show you guys how this is done because it's actually pretty cool. But this is what a steel rule die is, and it's an essentially an elongated razor-blade made out of hardened steel. It's made using a combination of like plywood and band saws, laser cutters, these things on here, rubber pads, which are meant to eject the paper after you press down. But a die maker cuts and bends steel, and it bends it around the plywood into a position. Then once finished, the die is mainly pressed into your printed piece forming it into the shape, and you can also create creases, or perforations, or slits. The possibilities when it comes to die cutting are truly endless, and it's something that again should be taken into consideration when you're designing. It has really a cool effect. Something to keep in mind with that though is that there is an initial upfront cost of making a steel rule die of making this thing. But the good part is that once you make it, you own it and you can use it anytime you want for much less cost. So, printers typically will have things like rounded edges or circular business cards and stuff. They already have those dies made. So, you want to have to pay as much. But if you want a really custom thing, you're going to have to get a steel rule die made. I have a video here showing a little bit how this process works in case it's a little bit confusing. But that's a steel rule die they had made up. The rubber pads around the edge of the part where it will get cut and then these spots right here are where it will get creased. But they put it into this, it's almost pressing machine. I'm not sure what to call that one. But they put it in there, screw it in, and they start feeding the sheets through, and inside this machine that's getting press down on, and then fed out at the back, and then once they have all of them die cut, just like a cookie cutter, you trim off the exterior of the piece. Then, what's even cooler is this one had some creases on it, as you can see here, and it forms a box. So, this is probably a pretty intricate pre-press, semi-intricate, but they all naturally forever. So, they can make that box anytime they want. So, this is the first half of the specialty printing techniques we're going to be talking about. I'll see you in the next one where we'll cover some things like overprinting, and duplex and paper, and edge coloring, very cool stuff. I'll see you there. 6. Specialty Techniques II: All right, welcome to the second section of specialty printing techniques. Here, we're going to be covering, overprinting, duplex and paper, specialty inks like italics and fluorescence, we are going to be doing some stuff on specialty coding, like vanishes, and spot UV, we're going to be talking about edge coloring, and finally, we're going to wrap up with glow in the dark ink. Now, the first one up that we're going to talk about here, is overprinting. Overprinting is a technique I have used quite a bit. It's kind of a savvy way to save a couple bucks on printing cost. The technique overprinting, is you're printing one color over top of another color to create a third color via the overlapping portion, so here's an example of a whole bunch of those in use. The blue might go over top of the red and it would create this color of the two mixing on top of each other as you can see, and you'll get varying results depending on the colors. Now, this not only creates an interesting visual effect, but like I said, it's also a way to save money on ink costs, because as interior, you're printing a three color job with two colors. Now, tricky part with this is overprinting can sometimes be a little bit difficult to foresee the exact color you're going to get with the overprinting colors. It's very dependent upon transparency, the shade of the color, the pigment, the type of color. It's dependent upon a lot of factors, but you can get really close and you can simulate the process on the computer, using like a multiply blending mode, or adjusting the opacity. But different colors are going to give you different results. Having a half decent understanding a color theory will definitely help what you're going to get when combining colours, but just knowing that overprinting as a possibility, and that experimentation may be needed to get your final desired result. But here's one of the best examples of this printing technique I've ever seen for overprinting. It was very deliberate and it was used as like a part to make like shadows, and shading, and stuff. But as you can see here, it's blue and red and I believe the blue went down first here, and then the red on top of it. But they're laying over the red sometimes as you can see here, directly on top of the shape with their literally both overlapping each other completely. So, registration on this one was probably pretty tough because they had to get it exact to register both screens or in this case, plates exactly to get the illusion to appear correct. Here's a closer look at that but they did a real good job and has that sweet bite going on. Now, the next step specialty technique we're going to talk about is duplexing paper, and this process is exactly as the name suggests. You're adhering paper together to form multiple layers forming a much thicker paper. You can you can duplex which is like what you have here, or you can triplex, which is this. As you can see there's a colored sheet put in between two white sheets. You can quadplex which is what this one is. You can sexplex, if you're kinky like that. But this one is two thin blue sheets sandwiched in between two thicker white sheets. So, that's a really cool effect. Now, it sort of simulates also edge painting which we'll be covering in a little bit, but this process is interesting because it's a great way to create new papers that nobody else has, or you can add color to a project without the cost of another ink color. So, like you can do this thing where you're sandwiching sheets in between to others. But another aspect to note in this is that when you duplexing paper, it allows you to avoid impression show through on the other side of the paper. If you were watching the earlier videos, where I shown you when you hit a piece of paper, and you get a really deep impression on letterpress, and perhaps the paper isn't quite so thick, you're going to get some show through on the back. Now, if you hit the paper really hard especially if you're doing a double-sided sheet of paper, you hit them both with no regard for how the back is going to look and then you duplex them together, you're creating like a seamless letter print job, or letterpress job that you couldn't normally get on thinner paper, so that's something to keep in mind too. Now, the next one up is specialty inks. Like metallic and fluorescent. The first one we'll talk about is metallic, and to understand metallic, I think you have to explain a little bit by how it's made up. Now, metallic inks are mixed by using a clear medium almost like a transparent base that you then add metallic flake to. You're adding little metallic flakes to, and you can have varying colors of metallic flake. But metallic inks are amazing because they create this illusion of a high-definition print, at a relatively low cost, so it's almost simulating like a foil for a little bit less money. Now, the as you can see here, this is an instance of a metallic gold, and this is an instance of a metallic silver. Now it's not going to be quite as shiny as the foil stamping because you're getting a little bit of the paper show through, through the flake, it's not quite as opaque. Although, metallic inks are but they're a little bit more opaque than spot colors, but they're not 100 percent. So, they're less affected by color, or the brightness of the paper they're printed on, but they still are impacted by the finish of the paper, and also sense they're like metal particles which are what give metallic ink a shining appearance. It's generally a good idea to use them for larger areas, like delicate line art or small type, won't have quite as good of an execution. It doesn't make as much sense for a metallic ink, you wouldn't get the full impact. You can do it but it's really apparent when you do it in large floods. So, here's another example of this was an 18 by 18-inch poster I did, it's like this it's a metallic ink and it catches the light, but it's not really overbearing. It's like a nice middle ground. The next specialty ink we're going to have here is fluorescent inks. Those on the other hand, they work by absorbing ultraviolet energy which you can't even see with the human eye, and that's making it visible in the visible spectrum. So, simply put, fluorescent inks are bright as hell, so much brighter than normal colors can be used to create liquid spot colors and stuff. But here's an example of a fluorescent ink print that we had done. But when you're mocking these up on the computer and stuff, you really have to just realize how bright they are going to be, so they're not going to look like what you have in your mind on the computer. The computer just can't get this color bright enough. So, finding the correct pantone book fluorescent color that you're referencing is really important. You also keep in mind you should use them in good taste because very often they're so bright, that they're not really that particularly nice to look at for long periods of time. They're good choices for like maybe small loud acts and grab somebody's attention, but as like a focal point for like a print in your home, or something that you're going to be looking at for a long time. They're pretty loud. Now, the next specialty technique we have up is edge coloring. Now, edge coloring, the process of edge coloring has been a little bit of a trade secret among letterpressers. Nobody seems to want to, they won't let the cat out of the bag with this one. So, I think this is because it's a difficult hand-on process that's pretty proprietary. But you don't really need to understand exactly how it's done to appreciate the result as you can see here. So, edge coloring is painting the edge of your business card, mainly used as an accent. But to do this, a thick paper stock is best. The thicker, the better. Usually around 160-pound cover or graders will give you the best result. Duplexing paper in these instances might be a good idea. But any less, it will still look good, but it's just going to be a little bit more subtle. It won't be such a loud accent. So, some considerations to keep in mind when edge coloring is that it tends to look best when the artwork does not bleed off the edge, because then you'll be competing with the edge coloring. What I mean by bleed is when your design travels off the edge of your page, when you have color that goes off the edge of where you'll be trimming, because this will help the edge appear crisp as possible. It's also not normally possible to edge color items that aren't square or rectangular. You need long straight lines, because they provide the best results. So, you can't really die cut, intricate shapes are a no-go for edge coloring. Each printer will be different in terms of possibilities. Asking them is obviously always the best policy, because there are some cool techniques available, like this, which is almost a gradient-looking, airbrush gradient effect, or you can do metallic edge coloring, things like that. I found a lot of success in the past doing really bright edge coloring on black paper. I think that's such a cool effect. It really gives a lot of punch. But again, experimenting and taking a look around the internet will really help get an idea for what you're thinking for your project. Now, the next one we have is specialty coating options. Now, the differences and correct applications for these coatings could take a while to explain. So, I'm just going to be pretty broad in this one, because there are a number of coding options available like varnish, aqueous coating, UV coating, laminating, and they're all similar in essence. It's basically adding a layer of transparent gloss, to both protect it and to make it shinier. It's almost like a clear coat for cars. You can do spot coating, which we'll call out just certain elements, like this is a poster that I did which was a two-color screen print, it was white and black. Then, we did a spot varnish at the end, which are these cross hatchings on the drop shadow, and it just glossified the black, toned it back a little bit. But it really catches the light on the black areas, which would normally be very matt. So, you can take matt card and make particular elements really glossy, like this. A vast majority of the options that I've seen online for spot UV coating are instances on black paper, because you're really making it extremely glossy and back ultra- glossy. But the appearance of the printed piece can be dramatically altered according to how the coatings are specified. You don't have to necessarily do ultra-glossy. You can get more of this, I would even consider maybe even more of a matt spot UV coating. But talking with your printer, if this is the type of effect that you want to achieve, is really important. They'll be able to point you in the correct direction for the exact type of coating that you're going to want to be using for your project. Now, last specialty printing technique we're going to be talking about here is "glow in the dark ink". Now, glow in the dark ink is as you can guess, is just ink that glows in the dark. It's in practice, glow in the dark ink is best used as an overprint. Much like what we talked about earlier, is like a clear medium over top of white, or light colored inks is when it's best used. As you can see here, they used it as a varnish over most of the poster and most of the ink is the last step. But the areas that are brighter, are the areas where the paper color or the pigment is lighter. So, where they're going over these dark instances of the house and the roof here, its tone back, but the white instances are a little bit brighter. This is just because the pigment of the phosphorus in ink can glow in the dark. It's just allowed to get a little bit brighter. So, now, here's another example of, this is what it would look like if you were just looking at, and then this is what it would look like in the dark. Now, they're getting this, the glow in the dark ink is what's going on here. It almost looks white, but it's actually glow in the dark ink. This is because the glow in the dark ink is translucent. So, it can be used over one specific area or all over your image. But the final dried ink is going to have a slightly green cast to it, when you get up close. But it's not loud. So, like here, this one's almost clear. This was a letterpress glow in the dark ink, which I think is pretty hard to come by. It might be a new thing. It's normally a screen print application or offset. So, this one was, just as you can see, just letterpress in. It almost looks like nothing's there, it almost looks like a blind emboss, but then when the lights are turned out it reads something else. Then, I believe this is a screen print application. Here, you can get a better understanding of the final dried color of glow in the dark ink. It's a very light lime translucent green. So, this one said, "I'll love you all night", when it was dark or when the lights were turned off. So, that wraps up the specialty printing techniques. That's certainly not all of them, that's some of the ones that I think are a little bit more cool, and if you research into some of these more things, and also experimenting and finding a printer who is open to experimenting if you have some ideas, it's always cool, because new things are always coming out. So, this is just to give you a base on some of the things that are possible, maybe to get your wheels turning for some things to try. But that wraps up the specialty printing techniques. So, up next, what we're going to be talking about is budget-minded printing techniques. It doesn't fit in completely with a business card project, it's really more used in production stuff, if you're making a lot of things. But I just thought it was really interesting to note for print design. So, I'm going to be talking about that a little bit, and then we're going to jump into the actual design of the business card and concepting and designing and pre-press. So, I'll see you there. 7. Budget Minded Production Tips: All right. Welcome to Budget Minded Printing Techniques. In this section, I would just like to set up a few scenarios and things I've learned over the years for really getting the most bang for your buck when working with printers and also using a few key specialty printing techniques. These topics don't particularly pertain very close to the business card project we're working on, but I do think that there's a value in knowing this type of information for future print jobs, to be able to talk knowledgeably to a print shop about some ways to really save both parties money and time. Now, in case you skip this section, specifically, I'm going to be talking about some things I briefly touched on in earlier videos, but just a little bit more in depth. The first one of those being stamps, which I touched on in the first specialty printing technique video, but I'm going to elaborate a little bit more here. So to reiterate, stamps are seriously awesome. In terms of cost effectiveness and print application, stamps are just really tough to beat. For instance, say you want to do some of these, like some custom packaging canvas bags for an item you are selling, maybe you have this super dope leather journal, and you want to get some packaging done for it. Well, your options for getting those printed online mean you would need to achieve probably a very high minimum order up front, and then the upfront costs for printing all the bags at once, so I would guess that to print like a drawstring bag like this would be $40 setup charge per color with a 100 minimum bag order. So, you're talking right off the bat possibly $280. Whereas, in comparison, you could order many different sized bags to try out. You could order this and a couple other sized bags and you could get one stamp made for all of them that generally fits all applications and print them as you need them. If you want to switch the design up halfway through the bags that you already bought, no problem, you just get a new stamp made. So there are many stampings available and it gives this authentic feel which I'm showing here. But if you wanted to do this, this job up front to get these bags printed would be, I'm just this ballpark figure, but you're talking $500, and then you'd have to sit on that stock until you sold through it. So you could simulate this with a stamp. It's really worth your time to check it out especially if you're a small business who wants to do custom designs for packaging without the crazy setup costs and all that. Now, the second thing I would like to touch on are cost effective ways to set your jobs up for printing. Now, this is achieved by ganging up jobs. By ganging up your jobs, I mean you're combining smaller print designs on to larger sheets of paper, and I'll show you how to do that in a second. But with me coming from a card manufacturing standpoint, over the course of the past few years, I've had to come up with a few methods of cutting costs for screen print designs. In doing so and planning for cards many times, what I try and do is I pick correlating spot colors and try and plan those cards to be printed at the same time. So for instance, these two cards share a common Pantone color, this blue, and I had them printed at the same time. So what would normally be if these blues were slightly different shades, what would normally be in that instance a four color spot screen print which would take four colors, four screens. They'd probably have to be run at two different times, is now a three color job that I can run at the same time on the same sheet because they share that common color. So I can now run more sheets as a three color job and gang the design up on the same sheet and get a better per unit cost because I'm printing more of them. Also, since I don't need, typically speaking, a ton of both of these cards to start, because I want to test them, I want to see if they're any good in the beginning. It just hits a bunch of birds with one stone by helping me reach a minimum quantity with multiple designs. Now, the way that I achieve this is by ganging up sheets like I said. By doing that, I have set up like a mock job here. But see these two card designs share this common 637U spot color. So if this was one large sheet of paper, an 18 by 24, and all of these designs were ganged up on this sheet, so I have eight card designs on 118 by 24 inch sheet of paper, and then it would be cut down later. So they print this all at once and then they cut it down and then they crease them individually, but all these cards share this one spot color and then the two other spot colors are different. So in this particular instance, they might lay down all of the 7416U spot color, then they'd lay down this spot color for the other one, and then this one all at once. But if these blues were a little bit different, I wouldn't be able to run these all at the same time. It would require a new screen setup charge and a mixing charged for mixing a new Pantone color. So, by ganging up jobs like this, which you can do, I have a lot of success doing it with screen print. But you can do it sometimes with letterpress too, but since the sheet size is generally not quite as big, it's a little bit more difficult, and there's some other things that go in there too that make it a little bit more difficult. But the same goes for offset printing applications, and actually, it's even easier to set up those because you don't have to plan for common colors because it's our spot colors. So let's say you wanted to print 411 by 17 inch posters, we'll setting up your job so that four designs are on the same sheet will save you a tremendous amount of cost and play charges, and also be much quicker. You can trim them down after the fact, especially if they're the same size. So, something to consider here when you're planning your jobs from a from a production standpoint. Now, I know you're about this technique like I said, letterpress is going to be a little bit more difficult because setting up jobs have a lot to do with pressure and achieving an even flood of ink. To achieve an even flood of ink here with a screen print, you're just laying, you're just squeegeeing it over. It's not that difficult. But when you're pressing it in, getting an even impression can be more difficult. So when you get to much larger sheets and many different jobs, it can prove difficult and finicky to do that. So talking to your printer when it comes to a letterpress application about ganging up jobs is definitely something you should do. Now, another thing that I want to talk about is some print shops, one in particular that I use a lot for promotional items, marketing things, packaging, that kind of stuff, is Jakprints, which I listed in the resource section. But they're actually known as a gang-run printer already. You don't even have to inquire about it. This means that they're pooling and combining a bunch of print jobs that are all going on the same house paper stock, and you get a much better price because of it automatically. Now, if you want to print on a custom stock, a stock that they don't have in-house and a lot of, your prices are most likely going to be significantly higher than standard pricing because your job is going to have to be run by itself on a press, which means they're going to have to incur the full cost of custom play output, press setup, press time, cleanup. They can't run them seamlessly with other jobs, and therefore, it's a much higher rate, it's basically like custom. So for the instance of promotional materials and packaging and things that either get thrown away or destroyed, but I still want it to be nice because nice things are awesome, I almost always try to find a way to get the most bang for my buck by going through like a gang-run print shop like Jakprints. Now, very quick, at the end here, couple of things I want to touch on, almost like pros and cons, things to keep in mind when setting up your print jobs. Be careful when using bleeds, and bleeds are colors or images that run off the edge of the paper. So like if this job, just for instance, ran off the edge of the sheet like this. See how this E is now running off the edge of the sheet. Sometimes in doing that, it causes the printer to require larger sheets that need to be trimmed down, and that can result in longer production time and sometime a little bit higher cost. Not always, but sometimes it can make things more difficult. Because let's say if you wanted to, you could put these two jobs together from a print standpoint like that and trim them down the center. But if they had bleeds, you'd have to separate them and put crop marks and do two more cuts per because you have an image going over the edge. So it makes things a little bit more difficult. Another thing to keep mind is if you aren't picky about paper, you can save a ton of money by using a house stock. Basically, you should just ask a print shop if their house paper stock, what they have in the inventory, and what might be right for your project, because you can save a couple bucks. Many print shops have stock house whites and they order a ton of it and they can pass the savings they took in buying such large quantities onto you. So it's worth your time to just ask print shops what they have in-house, and if it's going to be a significant savings for you to use that. The last thing that I want to touch on here is if you're interested in dye cutting, ask your print shop about dyes that they already have in house. Like I said earlier, a lot of them have rounded corner dyes, circular dyes, a lot of them can drill holes for no added cost that's not a custom dye, but they very often have standardized for common cuts. But custom dyes can substantially increase the cost of the piece because it gets custom and you have to have it made specifically for your project. They also may have like a collection of dyes from previous jobs that you may be able to make work for your project for substantial savings. So those are some tips and some things to keep in mind for production methods of getting this stuff created and some things to ask your printer I should thought it would help. So, the next step we're going to be getting into is the actual design of the business card, some concepting. So I'll see you there. 8. Think Outside the Box: Okay, so finally we're onto the actual design of our business cards. Now, with an absolute resident shit ton of information from the research we've done to the history of printing, to the specialty printing techniques now under our belt, we can get started implementing them into our business card designs. Now, the funny thing here is that now that we have all that information, I actually want to take a step back for a second. When I'm approaching a new print design project or really any project in general, this is fairly common practice for my workflow anyways, I like to start new projects by sketching and shooting for a very broad idea or concept. I'm not worrying about budget yet or finishing techniques, I'll figure that out later. But it's more so just focusing on the idea or concept with the vibe of the card. Sometimes, the best cards are the ones that resonate the most on concept or idea alone. Not always, I mean you can have really amazing simple cards that are just simple in nature, they're not trying too hard, they're just letting the card breathe and have one focal point. I mean, those are awesome too but I personally get the most drive to finish a project when there is a concept behind it, when it has an element of witticisms to it. Now, on the topic of concept driven business cards, there are many examples of people online doing this because they're awesome. Here are a few examples. You have business cards, this is probably a lawn care property management, it's a seed packet, it doubles as seed packets, so it correlates with each other. Maybe a painter here, that's a paint swatch. So, there's this correlation. There's this witticisms. It's concept driven. Here's a chair manufacturer business card that becomes a chair. I mean, how literal does that get? Here's another one on the bottom for, I'm not even sure what this is for but it's a business card that becomes a wrench. I mean, come on, how awesome is that? Then obviously, the last one down here you can tell what this is for without even looking at it. It's a painter, the business card becomes an easel. So, it's this concept driven ideas that really will resonate with people almost without even specialty finishing technique related, but you can bring them in to really add some panache to the end. Now, the way that I like to get into this frame of mind, this concept driven frame of mind sometimes, an example that I have been using for years is from a project known as the paper record player. This was done by Kelly Anderson and I heard her lecture about this project and I'm paraphrasing it a little bit. But before I get into explaining it, let's just show you exactly what it does. It is literally a paper record player. She manufactured this thing, you put the pin down and then you spin it with your hands, which you will see here in a second. How incredible. That's unbelievable. When I heard her lecture about this project, I'll paraphrase a little bit, but one of the reasons she said an idea like this resonates so much with people is because it evokes an element of wonder. When you take something like paper where traditionally would never be able to be used to make sound and you make it possible, it creates this sense of wonder and curiosity. I mean, almost like magic and it's that idea actually which is what prompted me to make the shot glass card, which is one of my most popular ideas I've ever had working under 55 highs. It's a card that becomes a shot glass and I approached this card thinking, "Well, what can I make paper do that it wouldn't normally do? Maybe I can make it into a cup. Well, what's more marketable than a cup? A shot glass. Oh that has a lot of examples of uses that it could possibly be done." But it's just the shot glass that opens up and then it's die cut out of the interior here. You pull it out and it's creased and you fold it up and it becomes a little paper cup. But the way I got to this was getting into this frame of mind of, what can I make paper that it isn't normally, that will add a sense of wonder. Now, that kind of wraps up that frame of thinking. Another method that I tend to use for making cards or business cards better, is to make them useful in some way. Maybe it's like this business card that doubles as a wrench. It's useful. So, for my business card, which I chose to shamelessly choose the topic for my new business Madison Glass Co. which is a hand painted glassware company, I'm going to try and think of ways to make my business card correlate with glassware in some way, particularly drinkware because that's what a lot of it is focused on, and interesting in unusual ways. Perhaps it's like a glass business card, which I mean, that's horribly dangerous and implausible but it would still be awesome if I could figure out a way to do it. Maybe there's some form of glass that doesn't shatter, or maybe the business card takes the form of a piece of glassware, or it hangs on the neck of a bottle, or just maybe I leave space on it to put a coupon code on it with people who order something. Or I mean, through the little bit of brainstorming that I did and the one that rose up for me personally out of all the ideas I had, was to make a circular business card that doubled as a coaster. This is going back to the idea of making things usable but they still correlate to the original idea. I'm making drinkware, why not make a business card that people want to keep around as a coaster after? So, I mean, I'll probably proceed with this idea and figure out some specialty techniques to really add some flair to the end but the idea is there. The idea in the middle making it correlate and useful is what will really take out just a regular business card and take it to the next level, make people to remember it. So, the options here are endless, as you can see. I could brainstorm for many days on this but the point here is to just for right now keep it broad, get some ideas down on paper, a mindmap if you will, and when you feel comfortable or you're ready to move on, I mean, you could do four limb on the one that you're positive is the one you want to go for and who's to say you shouldn't. So, once you're comfortable with the one that you're digging on, I'll see you in the next lesson where we're going to pick it and we're going to try and refine it a bit more and figure out what finishing techniques we're going to use and which ones are also feasible for the application, for the idea that you generate. So, we'll see you next were we're going to refine your sketch. 9. Refine Your Sketch: Okay, here we are at the next video, refine your sketch. Now that we have this collection of ideas, it's time to start refining the direction that we would like to take. This is tricky because normally in this step, I would take into account budget and make determinations on the direction I would like to take with that in mind, but it's much more fun not to do that and just shoot for the sky. So, I will leave it up to you in this instance for which direction you would like to take, but I'm going to be presenting some options here as examples that are like pie in the sky type deals. Things that wouldn't normally be feasible or things that I would pursue in normal print applications, but things to just keep in mind as you're evolving your print design. So, with that in mind, like I touched on in the previous video, I'm going to pursue out of all the ideas that I had down on paper, I'm going to pursue this coaster/business cards like correlation concept design. After a little bit of further investigation, I landed on, I don't want to particularly tie my personal name or number to it, but I just want it to act as like a cool premium reminder of the brand, like a plus up that you get that it'll make you feel good. So, I refined my sketch a little bit more of these lines, I figured out that communication that I wanted there, the circle wasn't really working with the layout, so I edited it a little bit to become more of an oval type shape and I landed on here and I was pretty happy with this. But something interesting that I would like to note here is how many ways I could execute this design using specialty printing techniques. I went ahead here and brought it into the computer a little bit early but just in an effort to show you what I'm talking about. I could take this simple seal design and I could execute it using any number of these. The point I'm trying to make is the possibilities are endless and ultimately, it's up to you to decide the type of feel, and the vibe, and the persona that you want to give off with the brand in combination with the specialty techniques you're using. So you got to make a choice based on budget, and brand concerns, and concept, and just what makes sense. So, for instance, this one seal, I could do down here on the bottom and might be cool to do a spot varnish thing of black on black, or I could do edge coloring with a white screen print on black paper, or I could do a triplex design like this example right here, where it's like almost like an Oreo, this brand orange color sandwiched between two black ones. Or I could do a split fountain color, or I could do a stamp if budget was a huge concern. Really though, the possibilities are endless. Here are even some more examples. I could just do a one-color letterpress design that uses maybe a loud color from the brand, like that orange. I could bring in a Kraft paper, or duplex, or foil stamp, or embossing and debossing. I could just get a white sheet of paper, a really white extra thick circular sheet of paper, get a dye made and an embossing dye and just emboss them. That might look really awesome and I can make them as I need them. So, taking in factors like that are really important in deciding the type of business card that you want to make. You can go stamp, you go split fountain over here, edge coloring on black. Really, now's the time by refining, I mean is figuring out the vibe based on other examples the direction you want to take. Now, let's say, I landed on this sandwiched effect, right? Two black sheets of paper sandwiching this orange sheet with the design screen printed on weight on top of a green paper, or on top of the black paper. Now, something I note here is in theory, on the computer and in my mind, this looks great. It's awesome. I think that would be totally rad to have this as a card, but I haven't talked about it with my printer yet. It is really important to get their opinion on this type of stuff. There have been many times where I've gone to them with ideas I've had, and say, "I got this idea, I think it's going to look awesome" and they're like, "That is not going to look good." They know, they're professionals. So, I have to take into consideration the direction that they're pointing me in and many times they'll take what I said and they'll be like, "I get what you're trying to do, this might be a better option." Then sometimes, I actually come to the table with new options that everybody's willing to try. So, it's really best to just talk to them about this stuff because that's how new things are found and if they're willing to try, that's really cool. So, like I said, the biggest point I'm trying to make here is, when you're refining your sketch and keeping in mind the specialty printing techniques that you're going to be using, it's endless. So, just keep a few things like budget in mind, the vibe that you're trying to go with, and just things that make sense for your brand. But also have fun with it and communicate with your printer. So, in the next video we're going to be talking about moving this to the- 10. From Paper To Computer: Welcome to From Paper To The Computer. Now, depending on the complexity of your design, this step may be very easy, or very hard and it's also going to require a little bit of imagination on your part to foresee the end result of your specialty printing techniques. So, due to time constraints, I'm not going to be able to get into a ton of detail. So, further investigation into some of the things that we talk about might be necessary, depending upon how adept you are at using the programs already. But I do want to point out some not so common print tips/pitfalls that will help you in the design of future print jobs and also some tips to use while designing your business card in this application on the computer. Now, with the size of your business card in mind, roughly maybe at this point, fire up your program of choice for designing. Normally in these applications it's Illustrator or Photoshop. But the main thing we're trying to do right now is finalize the layout as if you were to print it out on your home printer. If that was the end result, this is it, that's what we're trying to do, we want to get the size, we want to get the layout, we want to get the spelling, the general color palette. All that fine tuned in and so in the next step, we can prep the design properly for the printer. Now, if you're doing things like edge coloring or duplexing, keep them in mind but for this step, we're worried about the way the card looks in two-dimensions, flat, as if I was looking directly at it. We will specify all that stuff in the next lesson. So, to start real quick. If you were doing a four-color business card design, going the digital or the offset root, this is going to be a little bit easier in some ways and a little bit difficult and others. It's likely in that case you're using Photoshop as your program. I'm guessing that there's some imagery in there that you want to use or a bunch of colors and generally suited Photoshop is better for that kind of thing in the most part. But if you're using Photoshop, a few things to keep in mind are to make sure you are designing in the color mode CMYK and that is denoted up here in the top toolbar this reads RGB. You're going to want to go in the top of Photoshop to Image, Mode and then you can pick CMYK. So, I'll switch it to RGB right now. It's going to ask me if I want flatten, no it's RGB. This particular images is just black and white so it doesn't even matter, but as a general rule of thumb, colors will shift dramatically in-between RGB and CMYK. So, getting a more accurate color representation right off the bat, the best way to do that is to switch to CMYK. Another important factor in print design is the resolution and DPI or also known as dots per inch. If you're coming from web design, you're likely used to designing pixel dimensions, which is always in 72 DPI for the Web. But, resolution must be much higher in print to not look pixelated when printed out. Now, what resolution you design in print, really depends on your source files that you have access to, how high-quality you want the image to be and really what sort of limitations your printer has. When designing for print, an example of the minimum DPI you want to use will usually be about 300. The higher the resolution, the better the image quality but once you get above 300 DPI, it won't be hugely apparent. But to illustrate what I'm talking about, this particular one is a DPI of 600 at four inches wide. I wanted the coaster to be around four inches wide, that's standard coaster size, so 600. If I go in real close here, you can see as I'm getting closer and closer my edge quality doesn't really get any worse, in fact it looks great even at microscopic levels. Now, here's another one and this one is designed at 150 DPI at the same width, so it's four inches 150 DPI. As you can see as I get closer, things start to deteriorate, the break in between each line is much less, the resolution is much less. If you printed it out it might not be so bad but if you were doing a high-definition glossy print and you printed both of these out, you would definitely be able to tell the difference. As you can see that's even closer, that's something to keep in mind with DPI. Now, I can't go into too much further because I have time constraints, but if you don't understand what I'm talking about there, more research is going to be needed. Because there's things like you can't just change a low-resolution file to a high-resolution file. Resolution can only go down not up. In order to achieve maximum print quality for four colored print designs, you're going to have to make sure you get access to the largest source file you can find and use that as a starting point. But if you're designing for letterpress or screen print, some specialty techniques, stuff like that, you're likely inside Illustrator or if you're inside Photoshop, you're designating spot colors and Pantones. Things again get trickier in some ways in this instance and easier than others. But for one, if you're inside Illustrator, it's vector and since you're using vector, resolution is no longer an issue. You just design what you want it to look like at the size you want it, get the colors as close as you can using any color space, really. You don't have to be a perfect match on the colors because what ends up printing out from the computer, what it looks like on-screen doesn't matter. You're going to be referencing a Pantone book and it's going to be different from screen to screen anyway. So, the biggest thing we were just trying to do right now is get your design on the computer to the size with the layout and design elements how you would like them and once that happens, it's time to start doing mock-ups. Many times when it comes to print design, you're designing your piece so much larger than what it actually is in your hands and you can get a form of tunnel vision, when I get in here and I'm designing this piece and it's looking great and it looks awesome and this is all my screen, this is probably 14 inches wide right now and it looks great, but when it comes out, this type is maybe five points. That's going to be really small and may require some finesse, you might have to space the letters out a little bit more in order to get it to look or even be legible in certain instances. So, having a constant stream of printed out mock-ups while designing for print is a must, in order to gain a clear perspective of how it's actually going to appear in use in people's hands. Now, I'm going to wrap this up with a few things to keep in mind while designing for print, these are pro tips. The first one is, if you're designing with an end result of letterpress, if you're going to letterpress route, some limitations to consider are a minimum line weight of 0.35 points. So, if you're making a line here, the thinnest you want to go is 0.35. That up close looks pretty intense but that's actually 0.35 inches points. So, that's really skinny, but that's the skinniest that you want to go when you're designing for letterpress and same goes for type, the thinnest type, smallest point type you want to go is six points. That's going to vary a little bit from type to type, from typeface to typeface, but that's the thinnest you want to go in order to still be able to make out these really tiny counters and especially when it comes to serifs, serifs can get really tiny, so six points is a general gauge. Now, if you're going to be doing reverse type or knockouts and I can explain what this is, a reverse knockout is, if the paper for this particular instance was white and I was printing the black on top and using the white to denote my design, this is what would be called a knockout, a reverse type knockout. It's because this, I'm not actually printing on it, I'm printing the reverse of it. Sometimes when you get into really tiny things like small elements of a solid color, it's more likely to fill in when your screen printing or when your letterpressing these really tiny things. Because you're reversing the image, it's sometimes known as to plug or to fill-in. There's a tip that you can use which is, if you're getting really small type down here, you can actually add a super thin stroke, sometimes like 0.1 points of white. In doing so, it'll pad your element, it'll open it up a little bit more to compensate for how the ink is going to seep in. This is going to require a little bit of experimentation and communication with your printer. Hopefully, they'll be able to spot issues like that and let you know that it's going to need a little bit of padding or a little bit of stroke to compensate for that. Another thing is borders around the edge of your design are not a good idea. If I were to go ahead here and add a stroke around the edge of my design that was white, that's normally not a good idea when it comes to print applications and I'll explain why here in a second. It's best to avoid them altogether, they may look good on screen right here but when this card is cut, and die cutting in particular, but even if it's trimmed as a straight line, you're most likely going to have at least a little bit of lopsided edge. It's a hand done thing, it's they're being cut by hand many times. Printers, almost all printers are perfectionists, but even the most careful cutters are going to have small margin for error in the cutting of your cards, which can be even as much as one millimeter. But when you're talking about a very small card, using a border is like setting yourself up to fail a little bit, because it's going to make things seem a little bit lopsided. If you're even just a hair off, so it's best to just avoid them. In a similar tip here along the same vein is, if you're going to have designs that bleed off the edge, so if I had this design, let's just make it a color so I can show this and it was going to bleed off the edge here, that's okay, that's good. Because it's bleeding off the edge, it'll be an even cut. It will just go, it was intentional but if I had it right here, or maybe even a little bit more. It's best to keep your design around an eighth and inch away from the edge. If you have a design element this close to the edge and it's just barely touching or if I had a stroke that was just right on the interior of this design, the same premise with the border is going to be happening with it that close. It's very likely if it's off even one millimeter, you're going to be touching and it might cut off let's say, the tip of this letter which might look a little odd. Those are just some tips to keep in mind, as you're designing your cards, some general faux pas when it comes to print design. But otherwise just go to town, try and get it as close as you can when printing it out and I will see you in the next lesson where we talk about prepping this thing for a printer. 11. Pre-Press Introduction: The home stretch. For example purposes in this lesson, I'm just going to use this generic business card here to illustrate a few key points when designing for print. I will outline some standard processes for you to get started in prepping your files. The reason that I say this is the amount of information that could be covered here is immense. There are particular methods and best practices to be used for every single print application like separating files for letter letter press, and screen print applications trap. There's a lot to explain and I feel like it would be a rabbit hole of long videos to try and explain all that information in depth and like some other awesome designers like DKNG already have some videos of some really professional print practices for separating files for screen printing, and things like that. So, I'm just going to be covering the intro stuff here, to set up a foundation and some common questions for you to be able to speak knowledgeably to print your printer when setting up your file and then be sure to check out the resources section for links to tutorials all over the website for more in-depth coverage on this stuff. But I just want to make you aware of some things. So, to start off like we talked about before, it is always best to create your document from the start in CMYK color mode. To ensure you have a better idea of how your colors are going to print, whether it's in Photoshop here or Illustrator here, it's always a better idea to start off in CMYK. Just as just as a good method of practice to get in. Now, the next topic I'd like to talk about, so you don't get confused, is how to denote some parts of your print projects for printers. Now, sometimes printers will refer to the colors and the amount of colors in your job as a fraction. So, you might hear some things getting tossed around like four over four, or two over three, or three over four. When they say these things, it refers to the amount of colors per side and spot colors. For instance, this particular job right here, if it was one-sided, would be two over zero because I would have one spot over here in the orange, another spot colored this white on one side and none on the other. If it was a double-sided business card and I had white on the other side, it would be two over one and so on and so forth. Now, double-sided offset jobs are normally denoted as four over four. That would be a double sided offset job for over four. Now, if it's one-sided, it would be four over zero. Unless you have specialty printing inks or finishes going on and what you can get, you can get like five over four or six over four, if you have like a varnish or something. Now, to get into the layout a bit for how your design will work, I'm going to talk through this document setup here. The trim line here as you see referenced by the edge of this black area here, is where my document would get trimmed. If you have a dye cut, this is what you'll use to designate the shape of the dye cut you want to use. So, here's an example of how I would designate a dye cut. You would make your shape the size that you want it to be here, and then you would pick just some obnoxious color, like I usually use magenta, I am going to get my color palette, and then what you would want to do is in your swatches palette you would want to denote it as a spot color. You would want to call it dye cut. Then in your actual layer, you would also want to color a dye cut and leave it on the top most layer. That's a pretty standard practice for denoting a dye cut. You want to make sure it's sitting inside your canvas. So, many times you might have a document that is, this is a three and a half by two inch business card, but you might make it a little bit bigger and then move the dye cut on the inside to the actual size that it's going to be cut. But this would all be specified using the template from your printer or communicating with him how you want it to be sent. But the biggest thing that you're doing right now is just trying to make it as loud as possible that this is where the dye cut is. Outside the trim line, I'm going to show you a little bit of some common documents setup terms. So, we have inside, this is your trim line here, and then I made these rulers one-eighth inch inside and we briefly touched on this a little bit earlier but this would be what's called your live area. Your live area is what designates where it's safe to have artwork. You can have artwork here, but the important stuff that you want to make sure gets read, make sure it's inside your live area. Now alternately, on the outside of that, this area on the outside is what would be referred to as bleed. The amount of bleed can fluctuate that you need from printer to printer, but normally the minimum is for a printed pieces like an eighth of an inch, or 0.125 inches. That's what this is. To do that you go to file documents setup and when you're setting up your file, your outboard for this particular document is three and a half by two inches, and the bleeds are 0.125 inches or an eighth of an inch. Now, I can make it to more 0.125 inches and it would make it larger. Now, the last thing that we saw as we were editing the outboard, there are these are your crop marks, and now if you're saving out a PDF for something, you want to include crop marks because they're going to show the printer where it is you want to get your piece cut. If you're doing spot color, printing and like letterpress and screen prints likely you won't have to deal with cropped marks because you're going to be giving them an editable file in either Illustrator or Photoshop is pretty standard. So, let's move on here. Now, to specify varnishes or specialty ink applications and pantons, a similar process to the dye cut takes place. Each specialty application that you use will get its own layer, its own swatch, and its own title. So, for this document, I would grab the white areas, I would make its own layer, drag the white area to that layer and make, I call it white and move down here in my swatches palette. Weight is actually tricky because there isn't really a spot cut, you don't have to go to a special swatch panton process. It is just white. But just want to make sure you pick spot color, white, it's all zeros. Okay. Then you're going to go and see how it's denoted with this little dot in the corner. If it doesn't have one, it's still a process color but spot colors are denoted by that little dot in the bottom right corner. Now, I messed up. Let's get rid of that spot. Now, the other color, let's say I wanted to make this a spot color. If you really don't care about how close it is to the color you want, you can do a trick where you go up to edit, and then you go to edit colors, and then you go to recolor with preset, and then one color job. That will prompt this little thing to come up right here. Now, with the area that you have selected in the library, you're going to want to pick the Pantone process that you want to use. If it's a letterpress or screen print job, you're going to go down here to Pantone, solid, uncoated normally. That's normally what I use. That will bring up this job. It's a little modal window here. It's going to automatically convert the colors to a spot color using the closest CMYK values you have. If you double click on this right here, it will bring up your color swatches, but you can pick or specify other ones if you don't agree with the one that it did. But, this is a quick method to get to a quick Pantone color should you need it. The other way to do that is to go over here to swatches, go to 'open swatch library', go to 'color books'. This is an outside you're going to reappear. The swatches, open swatch library. You are giving me a difficult time. All right. Open Swatch Library, Color Books. Then, inside here you can pick your color book, like what we saw before. It's fallen out of the frame of screen, but you get a solid uncoated, and then it will bring up this little guy, and this is your new swatch palette with all your Pantone solid uncoated colors to pick from. I usually go in here, and I go to Show Find field. If I have a Pantone book in front of me, I'll have what I want. I don't know, let's just say it was like, what was this one that we had here earlier, 166 U. If you had a Pantone 166 U, you would just type in,166 U, and you can see it's being highlighted here, and you can just click it, or you can click any of these. But, the thing that happens is, as you click them, they're going to get put into your regular swatch palette up here, and you'll be able to use them later. Now, when you're getting ready to submit your job for print, you want to make things nice and tidy. So, whatever you choose, get rid of all the other ones. If we don't want any of these, we're just going to drag them all to the trash bin. Whichever one we decided on, we'll get rid of all the other ones. Now, a quick note here that doesn't really fit in with pre-press, but I want to just touch on it briefly, if you want to do some color variations very quick for parts of your design, then you can use global colors, which if you don't know that, it's pretty cool. Make sure you have a process color set, make sure you have all the areas selected that you want, and you can, once you have it set, you can double click it. I didn't select it. You can double click that process spot color that you had, and you can just change things. It's preview selective. If you want to do a whole bunch of quick color variations to a whole bunch of parts of the design at once, this is a quick, cool way to do that, like a designer tip. But, anyway. Let's say I had that, and I want to select the Pantone closest set up here, solid uncoated, and it will just transfer. It's telling me in this particular instance, 5645 U is the closest to that one. But, that's a touch on spot colors. Again, check out the resources section, there'll be more if you need to get a little bit further information on that. But, a similar situation would be going on if you had to do varnishes. Let's say I had this, and all of this information, all I wanted to do was a spot varnish, or like a spot UV coating or something. All you would do, is you would make another layer, you would drag the artwork to that layer, you have a spot UV, make sure it's on top, and then you would create a swatch, that's just an obnoxious color. It's just to do the bright red this time. Make sure it's a spot color. Call it spot varnish. Then, that's it. Now, if you wanted it to be black, if you wanted it to be a black spot varnish, or like let's say, what one we can do here? Let's say it was white, and we wanted to do a spot varnish on it. Now, in order to do that, you'd have to drag this section to the white layer, and then you'd have to go and duplicate it, so we'd have to make another one on top of it, copy, and then paste in front of it, so now, we have two. You have to drag that to the spot UV layer and make it spot UV. You can see, spot varnish. That would be the way to properly set up that document. It'd be sitting right on top of it. So, it doesn't look right, but it's signifying to the printer that you're going to want spot varnish on top there. Last thing I want to touch on here briefly, is a little bit about trapping. Now, trapping can get pretty intricate, but it draws from the same theory as over printing. Which is where one color lays over another to ensure that there are no gaps are created between colors, when there is like a shift on press, like especially with letterpress or screen print. By including a trap, you're just like slightly overlapping things over top of each other. Now, in an over print process, you would adjust the transparency so you could see what was under it. But, in a trap process, you're trying to do it as little as possible, but to still create a safe barrier. This particular design doesn't actually have any trap. But, let's say I was doing, all right, I stopped the video for a second and put together a trap file for us to be able to reference to get a better understanding of how this process works. Now, if I had a little drop shadow here, and this was a two-color screen print job, and they were sitting right next to each other, this would actually be 100 percent opaque, normally, it'd be 100 percent white. But, to show you guys how trap works, I'm making it a little bit less transparent. But, see how it sort of hid behind this color. That's in an effort like let's say, the printer ran this job, and it was off register just a little bit as the two sheets came down. You might get something like that, or maybe something like that, which is not what you want. So, you're trying to create a little bit of a buffer or room for error in case tiny shifts happen. Now, trapping is almost an art form in and of itself. I'm going to include a lot of links in the resources section for you to get a better understanding. But, if you are doing a letterpress or screen print job, it's going to need to be done most likely if you have any overlapping colors. Getting a better understanding of doing it will be needed. But, just wanted to give you an overview of how it works. Maybe even if you want to give it a shot, and show it to your printer and see what they think. But, that's how that whole process works. Now, this was a fairly broad overview of this print prep. To give you a better understanding of some of the logistics of it, I'd like to cover everything, but the information needed to give off like a firm, solid, thought through grasp on each printing technique for each printing method is another class entirely. I won't be able to do that, but hopefully the stuff that I did provide you with will give you sort of some reference into finding more information about the stuff you need to know to get started in doing this kind of work. I hope you had a great time listening to me talk for about two and a half hours. But, I can't wait to see some of the projects that come through the pipeline. If you have any questions at all, please feel free to reach out to me, or if you want to point out any mistakes that I made here. But, thanks so much for taking the class and I hope you learned some stuff. 12. More Design Classes on Skillshare: way.