What You'll Learn

About Practical Design for Print

Section 1: Fundamentals of Print Design

In this first section of the course, we will introduce you to the world of printing design and many other factors that are related and which should be followed while working with the projects related to the printing Industry. The entire section is a knowledge bank of theoretical information precisely put in a way to help you apply in the practical conditions. We work on distinguishing the major differences between print and web designing industries in every single vertical.

We will start our journey into the print world by introducing you to the pixels and dots methods which are considered as the first difference between these two popular industries. We will discuss the difference between these two parts in length later.

Color Mode:

You are introduced to the colour modes of both the industries. Here you will learn what is an RGB colour mode and CMYK colour mode. Out lecture will not stop here, we take you through the endless possibilities in the colours and show you how RGB can form 16.3 million colours and why CMYK colour gamut is not compromised compared to the Digital colour hues. In a varied discussion about every colour in CMYK, you will know the limitations of the print design. The subject is explained with examples and techniques that show you the distinctive features of the colours.

In the same lecture, we have several sub-categories explaining the importance of colour modes. The next topic of the lecture is the shades and here you will see how many shades many the gamut in RGB and CMYK colour models. The class includes certain practical tips and tricks as choosing the black colour while you are working on printing projects and how to make the press job easy by following certain print standards. Here, you will come to know the limitations of the CMYK printing compared to its digital counterpart. We will show you how to check the print friendly colours in photoshop and clearly mentions how to avoid the colours that are added in RGB colour gamut. You will also learn to choose the colours the nearest alternative colours in the colour picker of Photoshop that will show the exact shade on the output. We will show some examples of how to check the colour differences between RGB colour images and CMYK colour images.

The next lesson of this section is about the additive and subtractive attributes of these primary colour modes. You will learn the meaning behind giving these names to the RGB and CMYK colour modes. We shall clearly distinguish the differences related to the colour mixing and colour combination in both digital screens and on a sheet of paper. With the help of the colour picker and the colour codes, we will explain to you how the colour codes come together to show you adding colour and subtractive colours will affect the tone of the colour. The lecture is clearly discerned with the help of the colour charts created in the Photoshop software.

Finally, in this lecture, you will come to know the practical methods of how offset printings work. We will explain how a piece a white paper will follow through chambers of the printing machine and how the tones of CMYK colours will form to give you a picture perfect image.

Resolution:

The next lecture in this Section talks about the Resolution in the Print. Almost everyone knows about the high-resolution files they employ in the Print designing projects. But, very few are aware of the rationale behind putting them use. In this lecture, we will teach you why websites should have low-resolution files and why printing projects have high-resolution files. We give you few example about some common printers we use at home and office to the high-end printers in the Color Labs and the Offset machines. You will also know about the theory between dividing an inch of a file into a set of pixels and how a higher quality image is achieved by further subdividing the pixels into more pixels adding more colour tone, quality picture, and file size. We briefly discuss the positive and negative sides of having high-resolution images.

Working on Images:

There is a common misconception prevailing that images from any websites or from common search engines can be downloaded and used in your print projects. This lecture explains about the misconceptions and from where should you download an image and from where you should not use an image. We explain you about some famous sources of stock images and introduce you to some stock image websites on the web. Besides the image sources, the lecture deals with the quality of the images downloaded and what happens when you use an image from the web in your print project. We go through some practical exercises covering topics about using high-quality images and how the images should be duplicated before using in the print project, and limitations of using a high-quality image after transforming or minimizing and maximizing its size.

Set up a document:

In this final lecture of the document, we start talking the hands-on process that involves in working on the print project development. The lecture talks many things that are associated with preparing and working with the print projects. We start by explaining how documents are placed on a sheet of paper while sending to the press. The example we deal is a business card and how the cards are placed on a common paper to minimize the laborious print job. Equally, the lecture deals with clearing off the confusion about cutting edges. You will learn about a Bleeding edge, Trimming edge and the Text safe edge we use in the print. There is a detailed explanation of why you should use these edges and what are the problems you will face unless you are following these rules.

Section 2: Exercises

The second section of the course completely deals with the practical knowledge about the printing section. Once after finishing this section, you will gain an ample lot of information which you will get only after years of experience in the printing industry. The whole section is carried on in Adobe Illustrator and at the initial level, we explain you briefly about how to prepare a document quickly and effectively for a print job.

The first lecture of the section deals with designing a front and back business cards and we tell you the rules you should follow while designing it. We start by creating a logo for a body studio and place it on the front side of the card. The main part starts when we enter the designing part of the backside of the business card, where the name, logo, designation, address, contact details and several social media icons should be placed. Here you will come to know much of information related to the rules of the print as the margins you should obey and the size of the fonts you should use for a name, business name, designation, address, icons and many more things. We discuss the fonts that are print friendly. The business card lecture runs approximately one hour working from the scratch to the completely ready to print the document.

Designing a two-fold brochure – Designing a brochure is an important subject you should know while taking a print job. Making a brochure is entirely different from the way a business card is made. A card is a simple front and back object with no complexity in planning a design rather. So we chose a two-fold brochure which is actually a single piece of paper but folded two times to make itself a 6-page single brochure which caters varied designing techniques and common principle while learning.

For the sake of the lecture, we create another new company rather using the same logo and name which we employed during the business card lecture. You are introduced to the chapter by giving the blueprint of what we are going to achieve in this design and we start from the scratch once again by designing the logo and giving it a colour theme. We will take you through various elements of design as the central theme of the project, colour theme and how can we choose the colour themes and discuss various online resources to choose best colour schemes, how to maintain the visual hierarchy between every element of the design and how to maintain visual hierarchy within typography. This step by step process will let you become a master in designing brochures and you are already aware of every important part by the time you conclude this lecture.

Chapter 3: Pre-Press requirements and Wrap-up

The final section of the course deals with the requirements you should know before sending your file to the press for printing. There is a lot of activity that goes into the designing and the press stages. Some of them are adjusting the ups and checking the whole documents for an error- proof clarity. We will teach you what are the factors you should consider while sharing a document to the press in many formats. What are the requisites you should have while sharing an Illustrator file, or a PDF file or an InDesign file, Images and Fonts and much more information about pre-press requirements?

The final lecture of the course talks much anticipated and most common mistakes every designer undergo while working on Print projects. These problems span from minor mistakes as text to major mistakes as proofreading and pre-press template arrangement troubles. Overall this course is a jump starter for every beginner and any professional of intermediate knowledge can also gain ample knowledge through these lectures.

Career Opportunities you can pursue after this course?

Print Media is the profoundly huge market, which has its roots in almost every sector we see today. By learning this course, you will open numerous possibilities into various markets and Industries for uncountable job opportunities. Below are some of the important roles you can play by taking this course. But the gamut is too broad that we simply cannot fit the range in this text

You can be a graphic designer in Design studios or any other company

You can be an effective desktop publisher with added print designing and practical knowledge extended

You can become a visualizer if you are creative enough to develop good ideas and this course will help you bring all your imagination to the visual feel.

This course can easily take you to work at any publisher or a digital colour lab offset printers

You can work in advertising agencies as a graphic designer who can bring the visualizer or creative head’s imagination into graphical appearance.