Ubiquitous Internet Access

Whilst iPad users and other media techies would love to live in a world with ubiquitous internet connection and immediate updates where ever they may be, we are still a way off this due to cost and technical capability – which makes a journey on the London Underground feel like a retro flashback to those pre 90′s days when mobile phones either did not exist or could only be found in cars. So, why are we still using print and not investing in creating a free, universal internet connection for all to download and consume content? Well, in short – it is still difficult to replace the trusty, versatile, battery-less, relatively low cost book, magazine or journal with an electronic equivalent with such desirable tactile and convenient features, though modern internet browsing products such as Smartphones, iPhones, Kindle and the Netbook are becoming less expensive, lighter and thinner. Advertising, printing photographs or creating physical bound books will continue to be a viable option for many businesses or authors for the foreseeable future.

Personally, I do not invest a huge amount of time and effort into print design as it does not fit with the business model I have for creating new leads or promoting projects. However, I do have 2 business card designs for different situations – one with a focus on my primary design business and the other with a focus on the network of portfolio, blogs and social networking sites I use such as YouTube and Flickr. I also designed a printed brochure to promote my business back in 2007 which I still use and refer to for some of my previous work.

Greenbarnes Ltd, a client of mine, uses a variety of promotional formats including a large amount of printed advertising and so I asked director Mike Barnes a few questions about his perspective on print – with particular focus on promotion of a business or product.

Effect of your work

One thing that is more difficult with printed promotional material is the ability to gauge the effectiveness. How many people saw your article, promotional photography or call to action and directly made a move? How many people even read the page the article was on? This is where internet technologies are much more useful – a writer or advertiser will have access to information related to who saw the page the information was on? what browser they used? the city they were in? what pages they came from and how many people moved on to other pages and after how much time?

Another client of mine, picture framing company Gesso and Bole Ltd, use print in a slightly different way – print is part of the complete product rather than the means to selling or advertising. I caught up with Jim Anderson and asked him a few questions

Smelly Internet?

Another factor is the limited interactivity or media that paper will allow – though it does allow olfactory senses such as perfume samples, the smell of a quality paper or where the internet does not. Internet advertising allows for animation, audio, video and the ability to be tucked away, to suprise or to provide sequential information within a small space.

The basics

OK, taking this to an intellectual low – can you roll up an electronic ‘Guitarist Magazine’ digital subscription and place it in your back pocket like the paper equivalent – ready to read later on a lazy Saturday afternoon by the river? Not really, though some might like to try it. If you find that annoying fly sitting on the window [the one that's been buzzing around all afternoon] – do you hit it with the iPad, Smartphone, or the paper newspaper?!

My print colours do not match the screen

Understand that the colours you see on the screen are not necessarily completely accurate in terms of what you will get at the end of the print design process. This is mainly down to the difference between the way colour is created on screen and the way colour is created on paper: on CRT or LCD monitors, the monitor combines Red, Green and Blue light [RGB] to produce colour using very small pixels and any tiny, barely visible gaps between the pixel elements are black whereas the common process of printing with Cyan Yellow Magenta and Black [or Key as it is sometimes known] [CMYK] uses a combination of inks printed at various angles to give the impression of colour tone – all space between the distributed ink is white. Different input and output devices dealing with colour all have a different gamut – ie the range of colours a device can display or print, and the effect of the material or technology used to present this colour also has an effect.

Screen vs print

A screen’s gamut is usually much bigger than the printer’s gamut and this must be accounted for when dealing with images for print. The human eye has a much larger gamut of colours that can be viewed – monitors and printed material can only ever represent a reasonably small proportion of the colour available to us in the natural world.

Adobe users have the opportunity to set their colour spaces for local [eg US, European or Asian] printer technologies in the settings for Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign providing a reasonably accurate environment for the images to be imported, processed and saved in suitable colour spaces – though Adobe’s colour engine requires considerable calibration and testing.

I am not the designer. What can I do?

Calibration Hardware

Buy yourself a piece of hardware for calibrating your monitor [and if you can stretch to the expense, your printer too]. See the Design-Design article Why Bother Calibrating? This will give you a fairly accurate starting point though personally my X-black Sony VAIO seems to overcompensate black and therefore shadows are slightly heavier than they should be – watch out for this sort of inaccuracy.

Colour Management – the printed photo method

Unless you have been trained in Colour Management then the most appropriate course of action would be to calibrate using a special image from your printers – my current choice of printer provide a test image on their typical gloss and matt stock and request that people manually set the colour of their monitor or graphics card to match the printed image with an image on screen. In cases where you can use a test image then this is recommended because, if you can get a ball park colour value from using a calibration device, then adjust manually so that what you see on screen matches the lithographic print, you should never be disappointed [though may never see 100% perfection either! - but that's a very tall order]. Ensure that your colour management policies are set to off when you calibrate. For further information please see the Why bother calibrating? article.

Colour Management – the Adobe method

If you find that this process is not yielding the results you want [though if you constantly use the same printer then it is probably best to use the first method mentioned for increased accuracy], then try setting your Adobe software to the appropriate region settings for example in European countries choose EUROPE  GENERAL PURPOSE 2 and ensure that Preserve Embedded Profiles is set for RGB, CMYK and Greyscale. This is a catch all method for ensuring that files are reasonably accurate, though if you really want to improve colour accuracy then read this incredibly detailed document from Adobe if you dare!

Does the printer understand your design?

When I’ve finished designing and I am preparing the file for print, I usually create proof files in the form of low resolution JPEGs to send off accompanying the file – this helps to ensure that your vision of the document boundaries, colours and content is communicated clearly and that changes in the PDF between your computer and the print unit’s machine can be identified.

If you feel it is necessary to clarify the print job further then it would be recommended that a physical proof is sent to the printers. This may indicate how pages fit together, where perforations are located or where there may be problems in the PDF. These proofs should be annotated. Usually printers have received all sorts of documents containing all sorts of problems with vectors, bitmaps and colour models eg screen colours as opposed to print colours and so are often experts at identifying potential print issues – I just don’t rely on that knowledge as print is so expensive.

I recently completed a car sticker job for a client. The client was surprised at how much detail I wrote in the accompanying email as I made a list of assumptions of how the process would occur and asked important questions that needed consideration. Assumptions included the understanding that all text would be cut out of the stickers rather than another sticker placed over the top in white – the client did not know that the colour of the car body is white and that this will be expected to show through in text areas. Also, I was concerned that the 4-piece logo items would need some sort of template in the application of the sticker to ensure all parts were accurately spaced – the print guy told me that there was a special coating on the stickers to allow easy application of several elements in the right place. It is really worth getting into the fine detail before money / time / effort is spent.

Turnaround

Never underestimate the time that a printer requires to complete a job – printers run to a carefully planned and priced schedule and will not be able to deviate from this as it would affect their pricing model. In many cases the client can pay a premium to receive the printed material such as stationery within 2-3 days. For example, RCS, the print company I use, have an 11am deadline for the receipt of print and from that point, it is classed as day 1. Within day 1 payment must be made for the job to run within the time guidelines.

It is worth looking at the variety of print options available to the client – RCS offer an economy turnaround time which is twice the normal turnaround but can make savings on the overall cost of the job by 10% – 15%

Colour Proof

Printers can provide a proof of the artwork but this will come at a price. A chromalin or laser copy can be generated which will provide around 85% – 95% accurate representation. It is worth finding a local photocopy shop with industrial quality laser printers to speed up this process but do your research and testing first to ensure that the results are reasonably accurate.

Savings and Offers

Check to see if your printer has special offers and pass these savings on to your client. This always brings a cheery smile to the clients face and shows him or her that you are a loyal designer!

Policy

Have a company policy, even as a sole trader, in the way that files are stored, backed up and deleted. Deleting your files can be a way of keeping your system healthy and running at optimum speed. There are many ways to reduce efficiency on your hard drive including letting temporary files build up, setting restore points too often, installing programs you will never use or simply clogging up the desktop with documents, shortcuts and other assorted items!

My own company policy is to install software onto my PC only and to use an external 320Gb Hard Disk Drive [HDD] for data and a copy of this drive on a portable HDD for working on the move as you never know when project information will be needed on the road. Every 6 months I backup the previous 6 months of data to DVD+R discs. This is one example of the frequency of backup to optical media and you may wish to backup sooner – it depends on your attitude to risk and your own hardware.

Is Deleting Permanent?

Deleting your files with no backup can be remedied if the problem is identified relatively quickly and by relatively quickly we are talking about a couple of hours. Essentially there are a variety of programs that will allow the user to undelete or restore deleted files. I recently evaluated Piriform’s Recuva – a free download designed to perform the task of recovering ‘lost data’ and the results were that the program delivers a no-frills solution to recovering your data. It is worth considering some of the paid solutions to this problem for those people who need more guidance and assistance with separating their files into original folders as this is a function that Recuva will not perform. Other examples of data recovery files I have found from searching the net [and have not tested!] are:

• RecoverMyFiles
• PCTools
  

Storage Methods Overview

It is important to be aware that heat, dust, electromagnetic fields and other physical elements are out to ruin your data so be aware of the pro’s and con’s of storing your information on:

• Tape Drive where data is reasonably stable, stored in mass but can be damaged by magnetic fields and is very slow to retrieve. Many companies use this as a once-a-day process to backup the days work from all users in the office as it is a way to comprehensively collect massive amounts of data, usually in an automated process, for retrieval should any data from individual users be lost. Cost per Megabyte: low.
• Cloud Storage is becoming more popular. This is where your information is stored on the internet and can be retrieved by logging in to your server via a web browser. Typical examples would be www.acrobat.com from Adobe, Skydrive from MSN or Dropbox – all of whom offer free [or at least low cost], worldwide access to your data. Bandwidth speeds and hacking issues are the biggest concerns here and its not really an ideal way to store secret or confidential information – however, this is a useful tool for non-essential, low security class information when on the move.
• Internal Hard Disk Drive where data can be quickly retrieved and written to but can also be easily damaged by the HDD reader head crashing onto the disk if suddenly impacted eg in a laptop. Cost per Megabyte: medium. Most users use a HDD for local single user purposes only before backing up onto tape or other secure media. Hard Disk Drives now run into Terabytes of storage.
• External Hard Disk Drive has many of the features and problems of normal HDD’s but they need to be slightly more resilient to knocks, drops and loading. They are of course, still very fragile but provide users with a massive amount of storage in what is now a pocket sized item. Great for taking large video, audio or other media files on the road.
• Blu Ray and standard DVD+R or -R are very useful for creating additional backups of work on individual projects so that should tape or HDD fail, there is always another type of media that may have survived. I tend to find that I break down my file system to web, print and other document discs – I then refer to the recording date of the disc and find any information that relates to files created after that point.
• Pen Drive is a convenient way to transfer your files for projects or demonstrations with these small chip based devices providing on average around 16 or 32Gb of data storage in a keyring sized item
• Paper is the least favoured in the modern office. It would be great if we could truely generate the paperless office but we still need proofs, backups of accounts and other important document on yet another medium that will withstand different pressure from the elements.

“Through dpBestflow, we are striving to make best practices in digital photography readily accessible to all professional photographers, no matter what their level or working style” – Project Director Richard Anderson.

“dpBestflow helps translate the intricacies of preserving digital images into useful information that can be incorporated into everyday workflow habits.” – Senior Project Manager Peter Krogh

You can see the results of their work atwww.dpbestflow.org where the glossary is worth scanning through as a matter of interest or to find out about those acronyms you just did not understand in the handbooks! You can also download the Quick Reference guide as a summary of the information they have on their site – a single page summary of the most important info.

Whilst these codes may be seen by many as a gimmick with limited usage, I have personally seen them on food products, mobile phone batteries, posters and brochures – so there are people and businesses out there putting their faith in this tool directly aimed at the mobile and media hungry generation. They were originally developed for the vehicle industry to track parts and processes – find out more about them by visiting the Wikipedia overview of QR-Codes.

Advantages

• Reader can collect information alot quicker than a user can type
• Accurate transfer of contact, URL and other information
• Good for time limited contact – eg person walking past a billboard or poster
• Novelty factor and curiousity for the mobile generation
• Limited use and therefore if appropriate a business could be seen to be innovatively using this technology*

Disadvantages

• Mobile reader required. This is not available on all mobile phones or other devices. Nokia models with pre-installed QR-Code Reader software include Nokia N82, N93, N93i, N95, N95 8GB, E66, E71, E90 or 6220 Classic (APAC variants)
• Viewer needs to be fairly accurate and stationery to read the code – not easy for someone on the move or in a rush.
• Limited use in Western markets*

Create your own

To have a go at creating your own QR-Code go to http://qrcode.kaywa.com. For Nokia compatibility and software links go to http://mobilecodes.nokia.com/scan.htm. Other Nokia phones and alternative brands may not be compatible with this software – please check this before you download. Here’s one I made earlier:

Hardware and Software

Buy yourself some calibration hardware and software. This will measure the coloured light emitted from your monitor and automatically adjust the computer’s colour settings to represent the closest to some of those diffiult calibration problems such as achieving reasonable skin tones.
Personally I use the Spyder2Express system for my calibration – though, as the link demonstrates, this has now been upgraded to version 3. There are several other budget options available including Pantones Huey amongst others.

Calibration Image

You will need to request a printed example of this image – this is usually included as part of a colour chart. I usually put my design work through RCS plc because they are usually very careful to obtain the highest standard in print quality – plus they offer checking and proof reading for a small fee which is always useful as an extra backup after both I and the client have looked through the job.

Discuss

If your printers are not so happy to advise [though please not the use of advise rather than 'hold your hand at every step' which ends up wasting their time] then it is worth looking for a company who will give you a little customer service to ensure the best results possible.

In Conclusion

Please note that, using this process, there are no guarantees that your colour will be entirely accurate but it is safe to assume that, without spending thousands of pounds on consultancy and equipment, using these methods will significantly improve your colour accuracy.