or how to make your print provider’s day go better; Part 1
You love layout and design. Pushing around colors, text and graphics, manipulating pixels, and jockeying the mouse around the pasteboard until that eye-candy pops off the page. It’s got a rich, satisfying feeling like (almost) nothing else you do. And making the client happy with your cool concepts and designs yields the added bonus of bringing in the paychecks.
As printers, we love seeing those fine designs in all their glory on paper. In between the design and printing the finished piece, however, comes a lot of work. This stage is known as electronic prepress, or sometimes more simply as a boatload of pain.
Your carefully selected Pantone colors must be re-interpreted so they render with exactly the tonality you intended. The delicate transparency effects like feathered edges and layer masks must be brought down to earth so they look good when flattened into their 2-dimensional domain. And all that critical text, kerned and hyphenated to perfection, must come through the process with precision rivaling the work of a rocket scientist. In fact, the stakes might seem even higher than the star wars missile defense system. After all, this is no ordinary satellite orbit we are dealing with. It is your design – as well as your clients business – that is on the line.
The following tips are offered as a guide, a plea really, to design your print work with the actual printing process in mind.
In addition to this abbreviated roundup, check out Adobe’s voluminous compendium of data in their CS4 Print Production Guide, downladable here.
Disclaimer: changes in technology can render any advice obsolete rather quickly. But if you follow these principles now, you can help yourself – and your printer – stay ahead of the curve.

1. Size matters. Know the final dimensions of the printed piece and use this as the setup for your document size. Exactly. Whether using inches or picas, the page size must match the trimmed size of the final piece. A booklet that will be 6 by 9 inches should be set up with a document size of 6 by 9 inches. Make sure of these dimensions before committing any design to the page. In InDesign, go to File > Document Setup. In Quark, go to Layout > Layout Properties. In Illustrator use the artboard tool to size the document (CS4) or File > Document Setup (older versions).
2. Let it Bleed. This is very basic information; so experienced professionals, look away now. After setting the appropriate document size in your application, add bleed area beyond these dimensions. This might require a trip to the “More Options” tab in the Document Setup panel, but it is well worth it. If your page elements go all the way to the edge of the page, they must actually extend over the edge of that page to allow for (inevitable) variations when trimming the stacks of your beautiful printed sheets. Extend any photos, boxes, graphics and whatnot – anything on the document that you want to bleed off the edge of the trimmed page – to outside the page area. Usually a bleed area of 1/8 inch is sufficient. In InDesign you will likely see a red outer boundary rectangle beyond the page edge if you have set up the bleed correctly. Extend page elements to this red line. Quark doesn’t actually show the bleed area, but it will be there. Photoshop does not include any bleed setting until output, so if you must use this program to do a page layout, make sure to allow for an extra 1/8 inch on all sides of your page area.
3. Mind Your Resolutions. The general rule of thumb for photos and other graphics is to make sure the resolution is at least 1.7 times the line screen at which the job will be printed. Well, what line screen is this being printed at, you may well ask? At Red Sun we use either 150 or 175 line screen, which means a resolution of 300 dpi is  just about right.  Don’t be tempted to use much higher than this, as the extra data will only slow things down and not result in a higher quality job.  This is true for all graphics, except “bitmap” black and white (line art), which should always be at least 1200 dpi. Also, be aware that when you scale down a graphic in your page layout program, it  will actually increase the  effective resolution of the image. When you scale a graphic up in the page layout, the effective resolution will go down. This is why it is always best to scale the images to the correct final size (in Photoshop, e.g.) before they get into the layout. Vector graphics, such as those created in Illustrator, are usually scalable to any size. (An exception would be if your Illustrator image contains photos or raster effects – in these cases the image resolution can become a factor).  Fact of life: as a designer you will at some point be asked to utilize images that you and I know are unsuitable for good print reproduction. These images might come from the web, or from a phone camera. Try to get better quality images if possible. If not, you can sometimes boost the resolution and then enhance the quality using filters and adjustments in Photoshop. If you leave an image in your layout with an effective resolution of less than 90 dpi you can almost bank on something looking really messed up.
4. Transparency Affects Us. All those wonderful new filters and effects available in design applications have given tremendous creative power to even the most inchoate graphics workers. Drop Shadows, Inner Glows and Outer Glows, Gradient Feathers, etc all change the look of your piece in ways ranging from subtle to dramatic. They also add a certain kind of overhead to the document structure; more complex page compositions call for more careful treatment at the output stage (that’s us – the printers). All these transparent graphic enhancements at some point in the printing process must be “flattened” into their final 2-dimensional form; the color effects, the feathering, the careful layering of semi-transparent elements all must get reduced to the simple dots of ink laid down on paper.
Luckily for us all, the software normally does a good job of translating those effects into printable form; but there are caveats, and complex transparency can result in unexpected results at the printing stage. Anything underneath a transparency effect (a semi-transparent box or the edge of a drop shadow, for instance) becomes “rasterized.”  This means it will probably get  turned into a graphic of a fixed resolution. Text and vector art layered under a transparency effect may lose its sharpness upon output. And colors can change rather dramatically from what you might expect. More confusingly, In Adobe Illustrator, the user must set the “Document Raster Effects Settings” manually (for print work set it to 300 dpi). You may also see warnings about “Transparency Blend Space” when creating or exporting documents (keep the blend space the same as your working space – in print this would normally be some flavor of CMYK). Best practice is to go easy with the special effects. Don’t layer one transparent thing on top of another and then on top of another. Keep your text and vector art arranged above transparent objects. A great practice is to use InDesign’s and Acrobat Professional’s Flattener Preview to see how the page design may really be affected by the transparency effects.
Have fun with your toys, but remember that at the end of the day it will all have to be cleaned up. Adobe has put out a useful document for detailed study: Transparency in Adobe Applications: A Print Production Guide.
Watch for our next installment of this unsolicited technical advice soon.