Seven Things I Learned About Illustration and Art Working in the Print Industry

Written By Stephanie Broder

After graduating with my art degree, my first job was with a local print finishing and binding company. I’d studied letterpress printing and hand-binding in university, which seemed like a pretty good crossover. But I never expected just how much I’d learn about the real world of printing and binding in this job!

I still dissect packaging to see how it’s made, critique bad die-cut jobs in the wild, and provide (unsolicited) advice to all my art friends on their print projects. I figured it’s time to put this knowledge in a list!

Here are the top 7 things I learned about art and illustration while working in the print industry:

  1. There are two main types of printing

The two types of printing are digital and lithographic. Big print shops do both.

Digital printing is like a fancy version of your desktop printer. It has high-quality ink cartridges, and you send files to print from a computer. You can print anything from a single page to thousands for a very little per-page cost difference. While digital was originally considered the inferior printing method, leaps and bounds in printer tech have nearly caught it up to litho. Digital is good for small-run projects where registration doesn’t matter.

Lithographic printing involves creating a printing plate for each colour. This means you need at least one printing plate, but for colour work, you need a minimum of four: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Lithograph prints fast and big, running press sheets up to 28 x 40 inches (or more). You can also use spot colours like Pantones, fluorescents, metallics, and white ink. The setup cost for litho printing is huge, but the price per page decreases significantly the more you do. It can also have PERFECT registration.

There are other types of fine press printing, such as letterpress, risograph, screen printing, and relief, but those will be the subject of another post.

2. Texture doesn’t have to be faked

In the digital illustration world, we love to add paper texture or noise to our work. We exaggerate the shine to make something look juicy and liquid, and we add fur texture to make it look soft.

Sure, some of that may still be required in print, but you also have the opportunity to think in three dimensions.

You don’t need to add paper texture to your work - you can print on textured paper.

If you want something to look shiny, add a spot gloss varnish. For metallic accents, use gold, silver, or holographic foil.

One of the most incredible projects I supported when I was in the industry was for the magazine gossamer. Their theme for the issue was “touch,” so they made the cover with velvet-feel paper. Because you couldn’t print on this type of paper, the text on the cover was applied with a matte silver foil stamp. It’s so luxurious.

The tactile and luxurious foil-stamped cover of gossamer magazine

Another beautiful project had an shiny gold foil over an embossed image that looked like dripped molten gold. It wasn’t wet (foil is never wet, it’s applied with heat and copper stamps) but it looked wet. Delicious.

Lull magazine wanted some metallic elements of their model’s incredible outfit to pop - so they added silver holographic foilstamp

3. Colour mode matters a LOT

The two colour modes you are likely familiar with if you’ve dabbled with digital art are CMYK and RGB. But what the heck does that mean?

CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (K) which are the four standard ink colours loaded into a printer to create the full rainbow. White is not typically an ink colour because the white in any tone comes from the paper. Lithographic printing, however, CAN use white ink - for example if you are printing on black or coloured paper.

RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue and are the colours of light emitted from screens that combine to create the full rainbow. RGB has a larger colour range than CMYK, and it’s the brighter colours that RGB excels at. That makes sense when you think about it. RGB is created with light. That’s why when you print an RGB image, it sometimes looks duller, darker or muddier than expected.

This excellent demo of the colour ranges comes from Mixam Print

You should always work in CMYK when preparing for print unless you hear otherwise from the print company you are working with. Otherwise, you may have some unpleasant surprises on the page.

You should also note that there are other colour ranges. I know - how confusing! But you may be familiar with Pantone, perhaps from their Colour of the Year announcements. Pantone colours are sometimes made with CMYK formulations, but special colours, including pastels and neons, are available. You can apply these as a spot colour (in other words, a separate lithographic plate) even though they can’t be made with CMYK. Print processes like risograph, silkscreen and letterpress can also access unique spot colours like fluorescents.

The Pantone Pastels and Neons colour range

4. Emboss and deboss are different (and deboss often looks better)

Emboss is often the catchall term customers use but emboss and deboss are different. Emboss means the image is raised off the page. Deboss means it is pushed into the page. Both are exquisite additions to a project, but deboss is my preference because it usually looks more crisp.

Why?

Well, without getting too technical, emboss and deboss are created using a metal die (typically made of copper) and a plastic plate. A machine pushes these together with pressure and heat on either side of your paper to push up or press down the image.

With deboss, the copper die is on top of the paper - in other words, the viewing side. And the copper is crisp and sharp, giving you a clean, deep impression. The nature of embossing means the copper is on the back of the paper, and the plastic counter is on top. And plastic doesn’t necessarily create an image with the same amount of crispness.

Of course, a great project coordinator will help you get the result you want either way. Hang tight for point seven on this list for more about that.

This beautiful blind emboss cover of the Emily Carr University student publication is crisp thanks to excellent choices by the production coordinator

5. Vectors have very specific purposes

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people assume that illustrators use Adobe Illustrator and photographers use Adobe Photoshop.

WRONG.

People who want to make vector files use Adobe Illustrator, and people who want to make raster files use Adobe Photoshop.

So, what is a vector? A vector is a digital image file that uses math to map points into a 2D grid. That means you can adjust the image size without quality loss because if you scale up your image, it uses math to determine the exact new location of each point and can fill in all the missing data.

Raster images use pixels to create the image, so when you scale up a raster image, the software has to invent new pixels to fill the additional space. That’s why images look worse when scaled up if they aren’t a suitable resolution. Rasters are the natural form of photographs and are much easier for digital painting and drawing, so I usually recommend illustrators use Photoshop.

But you do need a vector for very specific reasons. One of them we’ve already talked about - anything that requires a die to be made needs a vector file to make the die. This includes foil dies, emboss and deboss dies, but also die-cutting.

Another one is for logos or branding that must be adjustable to multiple sizes. For example, your logo needs to scale down for a business card but up for a huge banner. That’s a great use for a vector.

6. Set-up costs will eat up your budget

We’ve already discussed how making plates for lithographic printing explains the additional costs over digital printing, and that’s one aspect of setup that adds to a budget.

Another thing to remember is that every process involved in your project requires setup on a machine or multiple machines, which can take hours. You are being charged for that time. It's tucked into the overall cost, even if you don’t know it. Trust me.

So, if you get your first samples of foil stamping off the press and want to take a week to review it and show it to everyone, they might have to pull your job off the press. They will charge you again to set it up again. Time is money in print!

Each process you add includes another setup charge. Printing, embossing or debossing, foil stamping, cutting, binding— you might think, "What! I just want a little extra work done; you already have the job on press!" But a different machine means a different setup and another cost. The more processes you add, the higher your setup cost, so save those big extra features for a project with lots of prints, reducing the per print cost.

7. Listen to your coordinator

A good coordinator is worth their weight in gold. They are an expert on the processes their shop offers (printing, finishing, binding etc) and can glance at the specs for your project and immediately see issues. Trust me - they’ve seen it all and know what works, what doesn’t, what looks best, what small changes result in big gains, etc.

If your coordinator says, your image will look better as a deboss than emboss? Listen to them! Remember point 4 above about the difference in process.

If your coordinator says you should use spot gloss varnish instead of clear foil? Dear god, please do it! Clear foil on the wrong project looks milky and gross.

If your coordinator tells you the grain of your paper needs to follow the grain of the spine otherwise your binding will look bad? DO IT. Even if it costs a bit more.

So many of the problems I saw in jobs came down to customers not listening to the things the experts told them. Trust me - the coordinator does want to make your vision a reality! But they want it to exceed your expectations and their tips just might get you there.

Stephanie Broder
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