So to give me context around this, when text is live and editable, the PDF is attempting to embed the font so that other computers that don't have it installed can use it (Like a Roland UV printer in Thailand for instance). But outlining text is a very standard print procedure that converts them into vector shapes, as if someone drew the text with shapes instead, it makes them indistinguishable. So anyones computer can read them just the same way it'd read a circle or a square in vector. The downside here is that the text isn't editable. That's of course not a concern for us at all because it's ready to be printed. For this reason though, you'd often have two session files saved (like Illustrator AI files). One called "MyAwesomeDesign.ai" and another called "MyAwesomeDesignOL.ai", indicating your outlined one, and one you still have live text in if you ever wanted to make changes to the text. Always outline your text when ready for print going forward.
Yeppers. It's going to be obnoxious.
Definitely this. We did the exact same thing in the print graphic design world. Working file, print file (not to mention archives and previous versions with every iteration). I don't go quite that hard at home: a new file for every change, but it's a good practice.
Very nice work! Can tell us about the 4uzz?
Thank you! And I would love to!
That's really awesome. Great idea too.
Thanks for the reply! Appearance of black is accurate for both, I've already checked that before. My monitor definitely isn't high quality in the image sense, I guess the phone should be better but I don't really see any significant difference in it.
Sorry, that wasn't clear—check the swatches, or even, skipping the "adding colors to swatch palette" step, you could, with the white arrow tool, select a single piece of a dark gray area and then see what the combined CMYK values are.
Right, thanks, I didn't realize I could just select one area and check the values. Any tips on what I should aim for with dark gray? Or should I just check what I usually have and aim for a little lower than that?
Bear in mind I have almost 20 yrs experience in the print design world, so a lot of it is just instinct / gut feeling mixed with automatic process, and it can be hard to explain briefly, so apologies if there are any gaps.
Those enclosures came out amazing! Thanks again, I'll also check the post you linked in detail.Bear in mind I have almost 20 yrs experience in the print design world, so a lot of it is just instinct / gut feeling mixed with automatic process, and it can be hard to explain briefly, so apologies if there are any gaps.
Avoid anything K=100—typically I make my darkest gray ~K=90—again, this is hard to do on screen. Ink saturation can be viewed in illustrator, looking at the Color palette where you see the CMYK sliders. But this sort of thing, especially if you want to do a full-color, realistic-looking image like you have on the fuzzmaster general, it's best to do all of the CMYK adjustment in Photoshop, then import the image into Illustrator to auto-trace. But again, I don't typically do more than 64 colors when I do an auto-trace (that's the extreme end; typically it's >32 colors). The most important part is the black generation portion of that CMYK image prep.
For some applications what I will occasionally do is rather extreme and may not be to everyone's taste. I look at the areas of the design and then look at whatever enclosure color I'm going to use, and see if I can remove any areas of ink that are either the same, or near-as-makes-no-difference the same. Again, I'm personally not into the full, photorealistic graphic end of things.
Here's are two examples. I knew they would both be on black enclosures, and I planned my image adjustment accordingly so that I could 1) have high enough contrast to do what I wanted here, and 2) few enough colors so I could manually tweak them.
So those areas which were dark enough just got deleted in the final print file (again, I've mentioned this, but as a general rule, NEVER make these kinds of destructive changes with your main, working art file; always save-as a new file for print export purposes).
You might be able to tweak the contrast on your base image so more of the dark areas around the smoky, cloudy, aurora-y areas could simply be removed.
Here are the results of those two examples; your mileage may vary:
I hope that is helpful. My process is to see the limitations/intentions of printing on enclosures (simpler is better) and work within those constraints.
