Saturday, February 23, 2013

Design's Tips: True Black vs Rich Black

Over the years of my collaboration experience, I notice that many young designers, who have very little to no experience with printing often have overlooked the importance of using an appropriate black before sending their designs out for printing.

Today, I'm going to discuss about 2 different of blacks; a simple topic and yet, always being overlooked by many people. Now what exactly is this true black and rich black?

A true black is comprised of 100% black only while a rich black is comprised of a mixture value of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black usually at this value (75 C, 68 M, 67 Y, 90 B) as derived from adobe photoshop to stimulate a richer-colored black when viewed on monitor in RGB mode.

Having submitting a printing file using a rich black creates a few problems:
  1. Longer Time to Dry
  2. Color Ghosting

1. Longer Time to Dry

When more layers of color are stacked together on a printing, it usually means it's going to take more time for the ink to get dry. This indirectly causes another problem that is color smudging.
rich black, cmyk stacks

Your prints will be stacked on one another before the inks are dried. Without doubts, most if not all of your printing might be spoiled and deemed unusable. You may think that "Okay, that only happens in offset printing but how about digital printing?"

In digital printing, you will not have the problem of ink smudging on the printings but it usually cause papers to be jammed inside the printer. An ideal color combination of CMYK should be not more than 50% for each color at the same time. 

2. Color Ghosting

The main culprit of this so-called "Color Ghosting" is normally caused by misalignment of every color plate/film for offset printing or drum cartridges in the digital printing. Therefore, whichever printing method is opted for, this problem will occur.

Such a problem will be magnified further when a rich black or too many color combinations of CMYK  are used. Here is a sample of Color Ghosting caused by mis-alignment of plates or drum cartridges:
color ghost, misalignment issue
Both designers and printing operators should do their part to reduce the problem to minimal. The printing operators should be doing alignment checking on their machine carefully before starting to print. For everyone's information, no matter how accurate the alignment is done, it is still likely to have very microscopic misalignment to occur. Therefore, it would be wise to choose the application of the colors wisely for the design.

If you have questions, feel free to drop it at the comment area. I would love to hear it out.

Friday, February 8, 2013

Logo Design - Wisin Music Centre

Found another old logo designs I did back in April 2010. The design did not make it to the end. However, better not let my effort go wasted like that. How do you think about these logos? Do give me some feedback. ^_^
wisin, music, logo design

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Design's Tips: Megapixels and Print Size Explained

These days when people buy digital cameras, megapixels has always been the main consideration of the purchase. Even the salesperson I met also will introduce a digital camera and putting megapixels as the main reason I should get it.

Then, I met some photographers claimed that megapixels doesn't matter at all because it is the person who is behind the camera that counts. They make huge prints even before there are more than 3MP digital cameras are available and those prints are still fantastically beautiful. So, is that true? Not exactly...

Today, I'm not going to talk about digital cameras but I shall talk about my knowledge on the megapixels itself. I do aware that some people think that the bigger the megapixels, the better it is and it gives some sort of self-satisfaction. However, bigger megapixel usually take up more storage space and you will need a bigger storage hard disk to cater for all the image files.

Now, here is the thing - all of us knows that digital image is made up of a collection of pixels and most often that not, I do get questioned for "How many image's pixels do I need for my design job?" Now that's an annoying question usually received by certain photographers or sometimes, web designers because most designers don't usually memorize the pixel sizes but instead, we calculate the image's size based on the inch or mm at 300 dpi/ppi.

You might be wondering why must be exactly 300 dpi/ppi and not something lesser than that? Well, that really depends on what and how the final design is delivered in the end. For a magazine quality, which requires the viewer to look at the design at real close distance, 300 dpi/ppi is the only acceptable standard and as designers, we deliver high quality products to our customers as well just like any other professionals out there.
megapixel, print, size, megapixels chart
So back to the question, how many megapixels digital camera is necessary to get the job done. Well, for my case, you need at least 4MP digital camera to provide images for a full A5 size print (148.5mm x 210mm) and at least 9~10MP digital camera to provide images for a full A4 size print (210mm x 297mm).

As for banners and buntings, they are normally viewed from a distance so a 100 dpi/ppi would be suffice. For example, a 6~8MP digital camera will do the job just right for a 2ft x 6ft bunting.

Digital cameras up-to-date at these days offer an approximately 12MP image files and that is more than enough for high resolution design job for A5 to A4 size prints and middle resolution for banners and buntings.  My verdict is unless you are doing a very high quality prints at 300 dpi/ppi A2 size , you would not need a 36MP digital camera, which only Nikon D800/D800E offers that, period.

Friday, February 1, 2013

Logo Design - First Care Pharmacy

Another old logo design project - First Care Pharmacy. Half-way project but the credits are taken by another designer. Kind of sad because I put a lot of effort in this job.

These days, I didn't take logo project anymore because it took too much of my time and the clients always cancel the projects before it is completed.

Thought of the day: Do I like logo project? Nah, not really...XD
first care pharmacy, firstcare pharmacy

Logo Design - Otakushi

Some logo designs I did few years ago before I have this blog.The team doesn't like my design so none of them is used in the end.