3 Deadly Sins of Print Design
We’ve all had the painful experience of being handed a brochure that was “designed” with Word Art (or the slightly less painful Pages). The “designer” (we’ll call him Larry) beams, happy to see that his arched, distorted, glowing type is burning holes in your hands. You wouldn’t make those mistakes, would you? Of course not! You are an experienced designer, right?
Right. That’s what Larry says.
Some of the best designers have been tripped up by simple mistakes when designing for print. Obviously, we aren’t just talking about WordArt. We’re talking about a design that looks great on the screen, but it sits next to Larry’s best when you try to transfer it to paper. These are some common mistakes that many designers unknowingly make when coming to the print world.
1. Designing in RGB
CMYK color
RGB color
The Problem
It is important to know that printers have eyes. Well… Sort of. Printers interpret data that is sent to them from an application or a device. That application or device outputs using a certain language, called a color space. The printer interprets the output, and then prints. So let’s say your Macbook Pro and CS4 are speaking Spanish, but your printer is speaking English. What basically happens: the printer listens, hears the Spanish, and tries its best to interpret it. Now, despite the fact that your printer may have taken AP Spanish in high school, it still doesn’t know every word in the dictionario.
The Fix
Fortunately, it’s fairly easy to fix this problem. On the first opening screen in Photoshop and Illustrator, you have the choice of working in RGB or CMYK. Pick CMYK if your design will ever make it to the print world.
Photoshop settings for print design
A word about color spaces…
Without going much into detail, RGB refers to two different color gamuts (sRGB and Adobe RGB), both based on modeling light to produce colors. Red, green, and blue light can theoretically be added together to create any color of light, the “100%” mixture resulting in white. The natural “blank canvas” of RGB is black, or an absence of light.
On the other hand, CMYK is based on mixing four colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, and “key,” an old printing press term for black) to theoretically reproduce any color. The natural blank canvas for CMYK is paper.
Unfortunately, there are colors that cannot be reproduced in the gamut of CMYK that exist in the gamut of RGB, particularly brighter colors, especially in the cyan area. This is where we run into our problem. Simply put, RGB speaks better spanish than CMYK. There’s tons of literature on color management available online or in print. (Note: CMS, in the print world, stands for color management system.)
2. Forgetting to use Rich Black
The Problem
If there is an unforgivable sin, this would be it. Again, a simple understanding of CMYK is needed.
A printer takes the CMYK info it is sent and puts out ink according to that info. CMYK value refers to a set of 4 numbers between one and 100 representing the amount of each color mixed in to achieve the desired color. So you would immediately guess that k=100 would mean black, right?
Larry said so.
K=100 produces a dark grey that is definitively not black.
The Fix
Once again, easy fix; use values for rich black. Rich black mixes in some cyan, magenta, and/or yellow to darken the 100% Key. There are many different opinions on what is best, but there are basically two kinds; warm and cool. Generally accepted values (in order of CMY) are 70, 50, 30 (known as “designer black”), 60, 40, 40 (cool black) and 40, 60, 40, (warm black). All of these are mixed with k=100.
Some people say that a “C” value of 40 and a k value of 100 does the trick just fine; the point is to add some kind of extra into your blacks to make them… well, black.
Do NOT use rich black for smaller text; registration problems (where one cmyk ink prints slightly in the wrong place) will make your text unreadable. And no one wants that. Usually using k=100 for black text is readable enough.
Another neat trick: if your text is large enough that you want to use rich black, but is just small enough that registration may pose a threat, outline your text with .5 or 1 pt of k=100. This will take care of the registration problems. Note: the outline should be on the inside and should replace the original area it lays over, so that your text is not improperly displayed.
3. Using the wrong resolution
A low resolution will show pixelation both on screen and in print
Using high-resolution images ensures clarity
The Problem
Using the wrong resolution in your works can be detrimental to your final outcome. It is important to know the final destination of your work so that you can design at the correct resolution. Most printers print at about 300dpi (dots per inch), some even at 600dpi or above. The resolution of a monitor is 72ppi (pixels per inch), and is a default setting in Photoshop and Illustrator for RGB design.
A few things to note…
So let’s talk about some basic differences between dpi and ppi, and then decide what is best to use for different projects.
Simply put, pixels are square, dots are… well, dots. They consist of one color. Obviously, the more dots or pixels per inch, the more detailed and accurate your picture will be. It is important to design at 300ppi so that when you print on a 300 dpi printer, each pixel is translated as a dot. It is okay to design at a higher ppi than your printer’s dpi, but be careful designing below 300ppi.
The Fix
Unless you are designing something huge, the magic number for print design is… you guessed it, 300dpi. Generally, anything that you can hold in your hands should be designed at or above 300dpi. It is especially important to note that though you can go down in dpi, you cannot go up without quality loss (when working with rasterized elements). Therefore, as long as your processor can handle it, it is best practice to work at 300 dpi or the maximum for your specific printer.
Depending on the size of a particular piece, you may have to design for perspective resolution. In other words, a billboard, from the road, appears to be a couple of inches wide, so therefore the dpi can be much lower (often around 18-20 dpi).
The End.
There are a million more mistakes that can be made in print design, but these are three of the most-often committed sins of print design.
Last tip: to avoid mistakes, ALWAYS proof your prints, even if it costs you a little extra.
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@Chr0nicle
May I point out that black is 0R 0G 0B (zero light emission) and that white is R255 G255 B255 (all the light you can have). But you probably just knew that.
@Matus
Don’t print block notes in CMYK, use PANTONE colors.
You can get a blur effect when you use CMYK colors and they need to print the grid in register. If the register is slightly wrong, you will get a blur effect.
It’s also better to use 100% of a pantone color. If you use like 50% black (black can be seen as a pantone color since black is also just 1 color – except for rich black) to get a gray grid, you will get a raster of dots. A line build out of a raster of dots is not as clean as a line build out of 100% “cool gray 8″.
Great post!
PANTONE is great when your client is rich or when you are designing in two colors. Otherwise you’ll pay for the CMYK and the Pantone on top of that.
ChrOnicle: Thank you very much!
lol printers see color to, sort of.
Typical arrogant designers.
Boy I know more about color and printing then you ever will.
Nice little overview for the beginner though.
Hi Bob, I thought that was referring to Printers (the profession) at first also, but if you read on, you’ll note that the article is referring to printers (the machines) and the way they interpret colour profiles.
Probably best to keep your hat on.
@Martijn
Very smart solution! (I am still in time to change the file :) )
Thanx alot
http://www.matus.it
You just educated me about rich black. Thank you so much! I’m a photographer and I design my own greeting cards and calendars and always wondered why the blacks were not as rich as they could be. I’ll be forever grateful for this post.
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Rich Black causes many printing RIPs to stand on their hands and vomit! Plus if there is Rick Black it is a complete waste of ink on a 4 color process print job. Why put color on all 4 plates when it is only required on 1? Better check with Larry again.. :)
I had a terrible Photography teacher who taught us the basics of Photography, design, and Photoshop. He was so bad at teaching and never stood for any form of criticism. Every time he would ask us to create a new canvas he would generally ask for a 300 dpi resolution (Which I knew was a good resolution from other photoshop classes I had previously taken), but he made us produce every project in RGB. I hated it. I always used CMYK, at home and in class, so I asked him if we would print any of our projects. He said yes the majority of them. I asked him why we don’t use CMYK. The only response I had was “This is how I do this, so that’s how I teach it.” He claimed to be a professional that only taught “part-time”. His only claim to photography was shooting wedding pictures and senior pictures for students he met in class. I never respected him, but I do respect his privacy, so I wont say his name. I just wanted to say that in this case if you are willing to promote your ideals onto others, you should also be in a position to receive input from your students. Thanks for the post, everyone should know this.
The first two sins are nearly unforgiveable, especially for any seasoned designer. I suppose it could be easy to forget to change settings, but it’s a habit for me to check that first. Thanks for the trick of outlining text for rich black – why didn’t I think of that?
But I have noticed color getting faded when working in CMYK, so have to change to RGB in photoshop.
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Wow, I knew about #1 and #3, but I hadn’t read about rich black theory up until now. Thanks foremost for the insightful post. Second: thanks to the comment posters for all of the additional comments. Very insightful as well!
@projectgrafix: you’re kidding, right? Right?
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Creating a print document in Photoshop has to be the deadliest sin of them all.
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I think the first 2 points are the most commonly practiced sins;
#1 mostly by newbies +
#2 is found in both newbies and professionals!
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Nice post – but surely not including a bleed is also another sin :D
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Ha! Totally agree. When I first started out I didn’t even know what a bleed was until my work went to prepress and failed miserably!! LOL! Totally another sin.
80/40/40/100 FTW! The problem here is that you do not see that your black is not rich while designing on the screen, but it becomes painfully obvious when your stuff comes from the print :)
These sins are nearly unforgiveable, especially for any designer.
Nice little overview for the beginner though.
Gracias por el articulo Jonathan!!!!!
greetings from Santiago de CHILE!!
My 2 cents, apart from the raging RGB CMYK debate (I will always design in CMYK) I think not preflighting, forgetting bleed, losing your text in the gutter have got to be way up there in sinfullness. And anyone that says not to use rich black has obviously never had to offset print a completely black page and have it come out grey now have they.
Oh and do yourselves a favour and unless you’re designing a newspaper in the States, or banging out the socialist newsletter on newsprint change your default workspace from US web coated (which I believe is the default for adobe products) to euroscale coated or whatever is appropriate for you.
The whole debate over whether to design in CMYK or RGB and when to convert is completely moot unless color management is turned on and your monitor is calibrated. My personal opinion is that it’s best to convert early, that way you can see what you are working with and make adjustments accordingly. For example, what if the conversion gives you a 1.3% black in your file? Obviously this will not enhance the color of the photo but just make it look dirty, and you should remove it. If you would have converted early on in the image editing process, you could have removed that black and not been surprised by it if you convert to CMYK when you generate the final PDF. Again, why is anyone bothering to argue about color if your monitor isn’t calibrated and you are using color management, and assigning your printer’s CMYK profile? Because whatever you see on screen won’t translate to what you get anyway unless you are doing those things.
Also, the DPI discussion neglected to mention that most printers output devices are between 1200 and 2400 dpi. This is for vector art. The line screen of images varies, as mentioned, between 150 – 300dpi for halftone work. But for any type and line work, it will be output at a much higher resolution. This means that you should NOT rasterize type at 300 or 600 dpi as it will look fuzzy. Always keep anything vector that you can, and it will look much better.
Once you understand the above concept, you realize that it’s worthwhile to fudge the colors a bit some time. If you have vector art that has 98% magenta in it, you’re probably better off bumping it up to 100%. Why? So that the output device doesn’t turn it into a halftone. If you keep a color channel of vector art at 100%, it will output at the 1200 or 2400 dpi instead of the 300 or 600. And this is why you should be in CMYK from the get-go: So that you know what you’re working with and can adjust accordingly from the beginning, instead of at the last second.
Color management really is crucial to everything being discussed here. Without it, we’re just wasting our time.
Simple, if you are working on a design which going to be printed then start off with CMYK from the very beginning, If not then RGB. Converting at the end is not recommanded at all.
This argument that you should start design in CMYK is not really an argument. Most designers will work in RGB (which keeps file size down remarkably in PS) and soft proof on screen in CMYK. When you are finished working on the file and about to throw it into your page layout software, that’s the time to convert to CMYK. As a rule, while working in RGB and viewing in RGB, remember that Shift-Command-Y is your friend. This will show you any colors that will be impossible to reproduce in CMYK, allowing you to color correct as necessary to reduce color shift at final conversion.
Wade´s last blog post..Why Rich Black Ain’t All That.
If you are a PROFESSIONAL print designer, then those 3 deadly sins are basic knowledge. However the same professional designers will know that these 3 sins are not really sins when we know RGB layers effects can give interesting results while staying within gamut colors, or a print ad is forgiving at 266dpi if printed at 133 linescreen.
However all this to me is besides the point.
What I find fustrating today is that these technical explanations are being given out to “regular” computers users, who in turn, decide they have the ability to do magazine ads and print materials that preflight departments for various publications have to fix, hence lowering further design standards as years go by. Print & by the same extent, web designers are losing their stripes (& many not surviving) because of the fact such information is widespread (while perfectly legal and praiseworthy from an educational & informative point of view).
When many senior designers have forged their craft & mastered their creativity over the years to create the perfect balance with the technical aspects of the trade, many non-professional “designers” are also joining the mix as self-proclaimed designers.
Hey, many will say I’m bitching but this is a fact & I’m just voicing an opinion which I hope will be helpful!
Cheers!
One point on rich black – using this level of ink coverage (to get true rich black you have to use 4 inks all overprinting each other) leads to it’s own problems.
One is scuffing, if using 4-colour blacks you should really have the finished print laminated as the ink is binding to the ink below it rather than the stock and comes off easily.
The second is imprinting. 4-colour black this can take a long time to dry, so when the print is stacked for drying the area of 4-colour black can imprint on the sheet above.
Dave that was true perhaps 15 years ago before aqueous and UV coating units were the norm. No modern press comes without one of these and the upcharge for a coating that will protect the ink and dry/cure almost instantaneously is usually an insignificant. If your print rep doesn’t advise you of these issues and/or take steps to take care of your printed piece, you’re working with the wrong printer.
True – it’s got better. But with the advent of digital printing we’re seeing the same scuffing problem on heavy ink coverage as you did on litho 10 years ago.
The best thing in that case is to work with a printer who is both a digital and offset printer, that way they can send the sheets from the digital press through the same coating unit they already have for the big ones.
The second sin happened to me quite many times, but i never know what’s wrong. Now i know there’s a rich black theory. Nice article, really helps me a lot!
Nice post. I think a lot of these common ’sins’ can be avoided if we only bear in mind that for print, the best practice is to go vector as much as possible. For on-screen bitmaps, Photoshop is a fine choice. But for relatively simple graphics intended for the print media, software like CorelDraw, Freehand or Illustrator should be your first choice.
These sins are nearly unforgiveable, especially for any designer.
Nice little overview for the beginner though.
Funny enough. I’ve been known for this advices quite a long time from now. What I find funny is rule #2, if your print degisn do it CMYK. But this one guy I worked with, he was creating a web layout and I found him designing it on Illustrator on CMYK!!!! I was shocked, i couldn’t help pointing him out “this is web design, right? “yes” “so, why are you designing in CMYK????”
I didn’t know to choose CMYK in Photoshop for documents that are to be printed. Thanks!
Great explanation of colours. I often find explaining the RGB vs CMYK issue to clients really difficult, but the way you’ve explained it is fantastic. I might have to point clients to this article!
Great post! I think that every graphic designer (and every “graphic designer”) out there should read this. People wonder why I went to college to study graphic design instead of just doing it…things like this are why!
PS – I hate Word Art btw!
Some great tips here and so easy to overlook if you’re not careful. Thanks.
PS. Yeah, never use Word Art. Ms Paint is much better for this type of work ;-)
Actually, you should always work in RGB, converting to CMYK should be your last step. CMYK on a monitor is just an approximation of what will be seen on paper, and limits the amount of colors in which you can work. It leaves no room for spot colors.
Adobe has recommended this from day 1.
Chris, I beg to differ. I gave some very explicit examples as to why one may want to work in CMYK if the final result will be print. And of course you can get a near-perfect representation of CMYK on your monitor by using color management and device profiles.
Adobe has its own political reasons for recommending an all-RGB workflow, namely automated Acrobat conversion to CMYK and their PDF RIP engine. Any printer will tell you they wouldn’t trust a RIP or Acrobat to make the CMYK conversion due to disparate and often unpredictable algorithms (which vary by Adobe product, I kid you not, test it out yourself) that can create odd screen values such as 1.36% or 98.31%. If you care about these details and want control over your images, you convert early in Photoshop where you’re in charge. Waiting until you have a PDF is too late.
yeah, rich black, I made that mistake one too many times
great tips :)
thanX for the great reference !
I am a prepress technician and a true rich black or super black is 100% K and 40% Cyan for a cool black or 40% Magenta for a warm black. Don’t use any other percentage combos as they cause problems for the printer. Also don’t use a rich black for any text under 20pts (printers hate that). And if you do any of the above most printers will convert your pdf to the percentages I have above. Only use it for large black areas and text over 20pts.
I did prepress for a few years as well. Each printer has their own rich black – our’s was 40/30/30/100. It’s best to ask your printer what their mix for rich black is if you’re unsure.
some really useful stuff here and good to keep fresh in your mind because its too late once you have printed a thousand of whatever you are busy designing…yes I have learnt this the hard way myself and ended up with prints fit for the bin.
thank you for the article and for all the comments… i am learning a lot :)
I think the most common sin even experienced designers commit is probably forgetting to use Rich Black, I had to actually come up with a way of reminding myself to do this one actually. The rest are pretty straight forward and something you should learn starting out by talking to other “working” designers, if you didn’t happen to take any classes. I definitely recommend that even if you don’t want to bother with a degree that you at least take a class in Digital Print Production, and that if you have already that you look into retaking it every few years or so just to stay fresh as technology evolves.
We are talking PRINT DESIGN people. Here are a few pointers from a designer married to a printer.
If you design for print always start with cmyk, working in RGB because your monitor will give you a better view is silly, changing at the last minute will muck up all your colours, calibrate your screen, you will get better results.
The screen issue is also silly cause you will never get the exact colour printed. You will find that no printer using 4 colour process will guarantee colour matching it is impossible due to many different factor a few of them include stock type, coating, ink batches etc.
If you need an exact colour use pantone, that’s what its for, and don’t go off the screen colour use a swatch, that’s what they are for.
All the people saying that rich black is a waste because you need to ink 4 plates instead of one, 4 colour process already inks 4 plates, so that is a moot point. If you are printing single colour then the printer will have a black ink so rich black is not needed.
It all comes down to knowing a little about how your piece will be printed.
Good points to remember. I like to use a graphic design printing checklist to avoid mistakes: http://ljdesignstudio.com/ultimate-design-checklist-for-print-files
From my experience, it is all in the printer you choose. I can have the same file, designed in Illustrator- CMYK, printed from different offset printers and receive drastically different results. Sometimes the colors are not even close to the same :(
My only experience with rich black was early on when a printer rejected my file until I changed all the black in the document to only 100k.
Let’s not forget proofreading. WAY TOO MANY designers don’t think it’s their job to proofread. A print piece that goes out with copy mistakes will screw you just as bad if not worse than the 3 factors being discussed here.
Talking about proofreading, I made that mistake once. And I’ll definitely not fall into the trap of forgetting it again! Never!
Rich black is required for Offest printing..to achieve a real constant black. if you are printing using a digital device such as a Xerox, HP Indigo, Konica, Ikon, or Kodak Nextpress rich black is not required, and in fact to get a dark rich black only using 100% black. But if you are looking for a warm or cool black then the adding of magenta or cyan will produce the effect you are looking for.
I just got off the phone with a printer who said that he couldn’t print my files because the black wasn’t a ‘true black’ I told him that I wanted it a rich black and he said he wouldn’t print the piece unless I made it 100% black (k=100). Never had that happen before…
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As a commercial printer, the last step in the food chain, we follow a number of these design sites with nonstop amusement and amazement. With all the kindness and compassion I can muster, I humbly suggest these issues are not casual sins subject to endless debate but very expensive violations of fundamentals in existence since the dawn of four color print. In all honesty, the client is the ultimate loser in this debate. We see it every day.