Sometimes a project needs a little extra something to make it stand out. A few little finishing touches can take a design from good to great. You can choose from a number of creative finishing options, such as varnishes, die cutting and embossing. Although you don’t...
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Planning Your Next Print Project
Thomas Edison said, “Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.” Most successful printing projects don’t happen by accident; they start with a good plan. No matter what the project is, it will require many decisions, and you want...
Plugin to Productivity
After you spend some time with any piece of software, you start to get used to it. You learn ts ins and outs, and you start to wish, “if only it would do…” The great thing about publishing software is that you can often get that wish. All major publishing programs...
Primer on Binding Options
When it comes to printing, almost as soon as you have more than one piece of paper involved in a project, you need a way to attach them together. This process is known as binding. The best binding choice for a project depends on both appearance and the number of pages...
Step into Style Sheets
Style sheets, also known as “paragraph styles” and “character styles,” are among the most powerful yet often underutilized features in today’s page layout software. Styles help ensure that typographic characteristics are used consistently throughout a document, and...
A Paper Primer
History Considering that paper has been around for almost 2000 years, it’s surprising how much there is to know about it. The manufacture of paper has come along way over the years. The first recorded invention of paper was in 105 A.D. A Chinese court official...
An Ink Primer
Printing is all about the process of putting ink on paper. In planning a job, it’s easy to spend a lot of time thinking about the paper without putting much thought into the ink. But understanding the ins and outs of ink and how it gets on the paper is important to a...
The Color Black Can Be A Gray Area
In the graphic arts, the color “black” isn’t quite so black-and-white, and being unaware of the “shades of black” can lead to printing problems. There are two basic categories of black: plain black and rich black. Plain black is created solely using black ink. If you...
Fonts of Knowledge
More than 20 years after the advent of electronic publishing, printers still cite font issues among the top problems they encounter with clients’ files. But keeping a few things in mind can go a long way toward ensuring that your carefully designed documents end up...
7 Ways to Help Stretch Your Print Dollars
What goes up must come down. Like everything else, the economy is cyclical, but no matter what the current economic conditions might be, it’s important to keep marketing your business. In fact, a little glimpse at history shows that even during the Great Depression,...