Graphic Design Greenville

The most popular printing method for small business marketing materials is offset lithography. This is a little guide to the process. It’s not suppose to make you an expert but it will help you understand the jargon of printers and graphic designers.

DESIGNING IT

You first have to start out with a design which is made in a combination of programs. Although Microsoft Publisher can be used to send files to be printed, it is not recommended. Designers like Photo Graphics use professional editions of Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and Indesign to create the artwork. Creating artwork in these programs ensures quality output (usually at 300 dpi or dots per inch).

FILM, PLATES, OR STRAIGHT TO PRESS!

Once the artwork is ready it can be output to film, plates, or sometimes directly to press! Film is used to expose light sensitive plates. Most large printers today go directly to the printing plates. The plates are mounted to the press. There is material on the plates that attract “water” and others that repel it. This way the ink on the press can only be in the image areas like your logo for instance. Speaking of image areas, images are made up of small dots called halftones that trick the eye into seeing full continuous tone images.

ON PRESS

On press there can be many stations (sometimes 8 colors or more!) with different ink colors. The colors create images, logos, and graphics. The ink is usually pigment based and transparent. An example of how transparent ink works is by adding equal amounts of cyan and yellow together will yield green. Using different sized amounts of ink together yield different shades of colors. Full color in printing terms usually means CMYK. Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black ink colors can combine on press to create thousands of colors.

Ink and water are brought to the plate with rollers that make the consistency more even yielding a more uniform ink coverage. When the ink hits the plate and separate image areas and non image areas. Ink and water have to be at the perfect balance or there will be problems on press. The plate hits a blanket(made more of rubber material) which will then hit the paper going by just as the blanket makes it pass. The paper continues on the path through all the colors and to the delivery unit. Once the paper is printed, it is trimmed down to size at the crop marks and doing this takes advantage of the bleeds which make the finished piece look like the ink goes all the way to the edge.

Post press techniques include folding, die cutting, embossing, foil stamping and more!

That is the basics of Offset lithography, I hope it helped your understanding.

Filed under: Graphic Design Articles, Small Business Marketing on September 19th, 2008