In late 2006 I was asked back to West
Notts College (where I took my diploma)
to set the graphics students a project of
my choosing. Below is that project.
Hopefully it educated them as to the
demands set in the industry that were not
apparent at that stage to me.
Design and Artwork a mini pack of the card game Top Trumps around any theme of your choosing.
For those of you whom are unfamiliar with Top Trumps... Superbrands Top Trumps Review
The full brief is at the bottom of the page, but here is a patronising synopsis of the professional aspects involved in this project.
Process CMYK
With very few exceptions, all the worlds commercial printing is done using 'process' printing. If designing for 'digital' ie web, computer graphics, programming, or any on-screen presentations, your document's colours will be RGB (Red Green Blue). However the majority of all design is done for print; and so will this project. So you'll have to work in 'Process' (CMYK). Whereas RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue (the colours of the pixels on any colour screen), CMYK stands for the printing inks Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and, Key (Opaque Black). These are the colours that are used in process printing everywhere on the planet.
Bleed
Bleed is the amount of artwork that falls outside the dimensions of the card onto the area to be trimmed away. Bleed in your artwork is really a margin of error to ensure that the ink is still printed to the edge of the page after the page is trimmed. Without bleed, if there is the slightest misalignment of the cutter when the cards are cut out you will be left without ink along, at least, one edge and so will have an unsightly white line ruining your cards. Bleed for this project must be 5mm.
Knockout & Overprinting
By default, when you print opaque, overlapping colours, the top colour knocks out the area underneath. You can use overprinting to prevent knockout and make the topmost overlapping printing ink appear transparent in relation to the underlying ink.
You may want to overprint in the following situations:
Overprint black inks. Because black ink is opaque (and the last to be printed on a press), it doesn’t look much different when printed over a colour as opposed to a white background. Overprinting black not only prevents white misregistration gaps from appearing between black and coloured areas of your artwork, it also makes your black stronger as it will have the underlying ink adding to the darkness.
Also overprint when the artwork does not share common ink colours and you want to create a trap or overlaid ink effects. When overprinting process colour the overprint colour is added to the background colour. For example, if you print an 'overprint' fill of 100% magenta over a fill of 100% cyan, the overlapping fills appear violet, not magenta. See below...
Magenta not set to overprint & Magenta set to overprint.
Trapping
Where colours printed from separate plates overlap or adjoin one another, press misregistration can cause gaps between colours on the final output. To compensate for potential gaps between colours in artwork, proper bo designers use a technique called trapping to create a small area of overlap (called a trap) between two adjoining colours by setting overprint hairline strokes to fills. This does create a subtle darker line between the 2 colours but it's a hell of a lot less noticable than a white gap between them.
There are two types of trap: a spread, in which a lighter object overlaps a darker background and seems to expand into the background; and a choke, in which a lighter background overlaps a darker object that falls within the background and seems to squeeze or reduce the object.
Spread (object colour overlaps background) compared to Choke (background colour overlaps object)
When overlapping painted objects share a common colour, trapping may be unnecessary if the colour that is common to both objects creates an automatic trap. For example, if two overlapping objects contain Yellow as part of their CMYK values, any gap between them is covered by the Yellow content of the object underneath. For example, if a red square were on a yellow background overprinting would not be necessary as the red already contains yellow (and magenta).
Spot Colours
A spot colour is a special premixed ink that is used instead of, or in addition to, CMYK process inks, and that requires its own printing plate on a printing press. Spot colour inks can accurately reproduce colours that are far brighter or deeper than the range of process colours. A good example of this is the current action man packaging which has a fluorescent orange spot in addition to CMYK. Alternatively, spot colours can be used for a variety of other things such as foiling, embossing and is commonly used in artwork for illustrating cutter guides.
Cutters Guides
You may have noticed from the above spiderman card or the artwork layout suggestion page, each card will need it's own cutter guide. The dimensions and shape of this determine the size and shape of the physical finished cards. As the Cutter guides are not being printed, they can make no influence on the CMYK design so must be a 'spot' colour. ALL spot colours MUST be OVERPRINT or it will knock out a white line around the edge of each card when printed commercially.
Layout and Collect
Try to keep your text out of Photoshop and in Freehand. Don't go below 6pt. How you layout your cards on your artwork is up to you. But bear in mind it needs to be small enough to print it yourself . (Take a look at TT artwork layed out on A3 pages). Also you need to make it simple enough for a really stupid printer to understand so he/she would set it up correctly for the press. Put titles above any cards you think should have them. Also bear in mind that the cards will be 'butted u'p next to each other in commercial printing and so the left edge of every card needs to exactly match the right edge of every card along the cutter guide. Also the top edge of every card has to exactly match the bottom edge of every card along the cutter guide. However the bleed is still necessary for the cards around the edge of the big sheet. Printers may build their impositions (big sheets) any way they wish so the link is only an example.
Once you are confident your artwork is up to scratch, print it out full size, and collect it for output and write it to disk ensuring you have all the relevant files included to open it on a computer 500 miles away after a short flight in the back of a UPS cargo jet.
As well as producing an interesting, informative, visually stimulating product, you must pay great attention to the aforementioned technical aspects as you will be assessed just as much on these if not more than aesthetics.
Requirements (updated 4/12/6)
300dpi, All CMYK, Overprint Spot Cutter Guides and Registration Tick Marks
8 cards, 62x100mm consisting of...
1x Cover Card including Generic TT logo - Colours may change in the TT logo providing the brand is still instantly recognisable.
1x Promo Card - This will be the reverse side of the cover card. Here is your chance to promote a classmate's project or something you have designed prior to this. You will be assessed on how effective this advertisement is along with any technical aspects you wish to include. This is an excelent place to show off what your research has tought you about 'process printing'.
5x Play Cards - Ensure the statistics/values you choose spread well across the range of cards and try and include some information that people will be interested in reading if not playing the game. If you can get people browsing through them even though they have no intention in playing the game, you're on to a winner.
1x Generic Back - This simply is the rear of every Play Card.
If you have ANY questions or you want some feedback on what you've done up to yet, or you just want some free jokes, just email me at stuart@designrefreshed.com
If you are sending attachments in your email, please keep the emails under 2MB.
Cheers, Stuart Hinchliff.
Merry Christmas!
Design and Artwork a mini pack of the card game Top Trumps around any theme of your choosing.
For those of you whom are unfamiliar with Top Trumps... Superbrands Top Trumps Review
The full brief is at the bottom of the page, but here is a patronising synopsis of the professional aspects involved in this project.
Process CMYK
With very few exceptions, all the worlds commercial printing is done using 'process' printing. If designing for 'digital' ie web, computer graphics, programming, or any on-screen presentations, your document's colours will be RGB (Red Green Blue). However the majority of all design is done for print; and so will this project. So you'll have to work in 'Process' (CMYK). Whereas RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue (the colours of the pixels on any colour screen), CMYK stands for the printing inks Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and, Key (Opaque Black). These are the colours that are used in process printing everywhere on the planet.
Bleed
Bleed is the amount of artwork that falls outside the dimensions of the card onto the area to be trimmed away. Bleed in your artwork is really a margin of error to ensure that the ink is still printed to the edge of the page after the page is trimmed. Without bleed, if there is the slightest misalignment of the cutter when the cards are cut out you will be left without ink along, at least, one edge and so will have an unsightly white line ruining your cards. Bleed for this project must be 5mm.
Knockout & Overprinting
By default, when you print opaque, overlapping colours, the top colour knocks out the area underneath. You can use overprinting to prevent knockout and make the topmost overlapping printing ink appear transparent in relation to the underlying ink.
You may want to overprint in the following situations:
Overprint black inks. Because black ink is opaque (and the last to be printed on a press), it doesn’t look much different when printed over a colour as opposed to a white background. Overprinting black not only prevents white misregistration gaps from appearing between black and coloured areas of your artwork, it also makes your black stronger as it will have the underlying ink adding to the darkness.
Also overprint when the artwork does not share common ink colours and you want to create a trap or overlaid ink effects. When overprinting process colour the overprint colour is added to the background colour. For example, if you print an 'overprint' fill of 100% magenta over a fill of 100% cyan, the overlapping fills appear violet, not magenta. See below...
Magenta not set to overprint & Magenta set to overprint.
Trapping
Where colours printed from separate plates overlap or adjoin one another, press misregistration can cause gaps between colours on the final output. To compensate for potential gaps between colours in artwork, proper bo designers use a technique called trapping to create a small area of overlap (called a trap) between two adjoining colours by setting overprint hairline strokes to fills. This does create a subtle darker line between the 2 colours but it's a hell of a lot less noticable than a white gap between them.
There are two types of trap: a spread, in which a lighter object overlaps a darker background and seems to expand into the background; and a choke, in which a lighter background overlaps a darker object that falls within the background and seems to squeeze or reduce the object.
Spread (object colour overlaps background) compared to Choke (background colour overlaps object)
When overlapping painted objects share a common colour, trapping may be unnecessary if the colour that is common to both objects creates an automatic trap. For example, if two overlapping objects contain Yellow as part of their CMYK values, any gap between them is covered by the Yellow content of the object underneath. For example, if a red square were on a yellow background overprinting would not be necessary as the red already contains yellow (and magenta).
Spot Colours
A spot colour is a special premixed ink that is used instead of, or in addition to, CMYK process inks, and that requires its own printing plate on a printing press. Spot colour inks can accurately reproduce colours that are far brighter or deeper than the range of process colours. A good example of this is the current action man packaging which has a fluorescent orange spot in addition to CMYK. Alternatively, spot colours can be used for a variety of other things such as foiling, embossing and is commonly used in artwork for illustrating cutter guides.
Cutters Guides
You may have noticed from the above spiderman card or the artwork layout suggestion page, each card will need it's own cutter guide. The dimensions and shape of this determine the size and shape of the physical finished cards. As the Cutter guides are not being printed, they can make no influence on the CMYK design so must be a 'spot' colour. ALL spot colours MUST be OVERPRINT or it will knock out a white line around the edge of each card when printed commercially.
Layout and Collect
Try to keep your text out of Photoshop and in Freehand. Don't go below 6pt. How you layout your cards on your artwork is up to you. But bear in mind it needs to be small enough to print it yourself . (Take a look at TT artwork layed out on A3 pages). Also you need to make it simple enough for a really stupid printer to understand so he/she would set it up correctly for the press. Put titles above any cards you think should have them. Also bear in mind that the cards will be 'butted u'p next to each other in commercial printing and so the left edge of every card needs to exactly match the right edge of every card along the cutter guide. Also the top edge of every card has to exactly match the bottom edge of every card along the cutter guide. However the bleed is still necessary for the cards around the edge of the big sheet. Printers may build their impositions (big sheets) any way they wish so the link is only an example.
Once you are confident your artwork is up to scratch, print it out full size, and collect it for output and write it to disk ensuring you have all the relevant files included to open it on a computer 500 miles away after a short flight in the back of a UPS cargo jet.
As well as producing an interesting, informative, visually stimulating product, you must pay great attention to the aforementioned technical aspects as you will be assessed just as much on these if not more than aesthetics.
Requirements (updated 4/12/6)
300dpi, All CMYK, Overprint Spot Cutter Guides and Registration Tick Marks
8 cards, 62x100mm consisting of...
1x Cover Card including Generic TT logo - Colours may change in the TT logo providing the brand is still instantly recognisable.
1x Promo Card - This will be the reverse side of the cover card. Here is your chance to promote a classmate's project or something you have designed prior to this. You will be assessed on how effective this advertisement is along with any technical aspects you wish to include. This is an excelent place to show off what your research has tought you about 'process printing'.
5x Play Cards - Ensure the statistics/values you choose spread well across the range of cards and try and include some information that people will be interested in reading if not playing the game. If you can get people browsing through them even though they have no intention in playing the game, you're on to a winner.
1x Generic Back - This simply is the rear of every Play Card.
If you have ANY questions or you want some feedback on what you've done up to yet, or you just want some free jokes, just email me at stuart@designrefreshed.com
If you are sending attachments in your email, please keep the emails under 2MB.
Cheers, Stuart Hinchliff.
Merry Christmas!