Ed #10 Prepress

In the meantime, here are a few ways to make the prepress process go a little easier:

Design to avoid problems. While your creativity shouldn’t be limited by technical constraints, be aware that some design elements are difficult to get just right on press. Image crossovers in perfect bound publications need to be managed carefully —it’s next to impossible, for example, to reproduce a perfect circle that runs across the gutter. Type crossovers can be hard to manage in saddle-stitched books. Frames that run around an entire spread can also be hard to align perfectly.

Fix problems early. Some professionals talk about an informal rule of 10, where the price of making a change increases 10 times over at each step of the process. Adding a comma during preflighting is cheap and easy. Making the same change while the project is on press might cost thousands.

Pay attention to the type. With designers taking over the role once played by professional typesetters, something is often lost—thorough proofreading. Spell-check and grammar-check programs are far from infallible and no substitute for a trained eye. And don’t expect the writer to be the proofreader—they won’t see what’s on the page, only what’s in their imaginations.

Resolution counts. While modern prepress techniques can work wonders, they can’t do much to rescue a low resolution image captured with your cell phone camera. To successfully print a 150-line screen, the rule of thumb is that you should begin with resolution of at least 300 dpi, and higher screen rulings or stochastic printing might require a higher resolution. Ask your printer how you should send image files—in either RGB or CMYK. In the past, most printers wanted only CMYK files, but now some are requesting RGB files because they carry a larger color gamut.

And don’t forget the paper. While the prepress process is increasingly electronic, the end result still appears in ink on paper, and paper can have an enormous impact on the look and feel of the project.

NewPage delivers the right papers for virtually every project. Gloss allows you to print highly reflective art, such as photography, with wonderful clarity and sharpness of detail. Dull combines lower light reflection with better readability and uniform print smoothness. Glare-free, easy-to-read, matte has a rich, tactile feel that can help show high-gloss spot varnishes and coatings to advantage.