I downloaded a youtube video of a Komori 5 colour press in action, which is what we have in the shop.
If you have never seen an offset press with your own eyes, next time you are visiting us at Printcraft Solutions, ask for a quick tour of the press room.
We are now starting to see work come for the Christmas season, and that must mean graphic designers are digging out their Christmas artwork to their newsletters, brochures and Christmas cards. Here is some help with free Christmas vectors from design bliss.
Happy holidays!
On Friday we had a Kodak technician visit the plant and perform a major upgrade of our PDF workflow, called Prinergy. We are now at version 5, it’s actually so new that it still in beta. We are very proud to have been selected as a Prinergy beta site, there are less than 10 beta sites in the whole world!
What does that mean for you, our loyal customers? We will have access to the latest and greatest tools available in being able to process your files with the greatest speed and accuracy. Of particular interest are the new PDF-editing tools that come with Prinergy 5. And it goes without saying that Prinergy 5 comes with the latest Adobe PDF Rip, so no matter how new is your graphic design application, we will be able to process your files.
So whenever we have writer’s block here at Printcraft Solutions, we turn to our trusted bible of printing, “The Print and Production Manual,” 8th edition, edited by Michael Barnard. An oldie but goodie. Here is an excerpt:
“All Printing measurements derive from the term ‘point’, which was the base unit of measurement used in the early days of printing to describe the common sizes of type. In those days it was used with no particular sense of precision. Founts were cast in 6 point size, 10 point size, 24 point size etc. but were known more commonly by name: the 6 point size came to known as Nonpareil, 8 point as Brevier, 10 point size Long primer and the commonly used 12 point as Pica… …of these names, only point and pica have survived to the present.
“A disastrous fire in a Chicago type foundry in the 1870s led to a call for standardisation and the point was defined at .013837 inches, the pica at .166044 inches. The subsequently became the accepted - and exactly defined - units of measurement for all typographical purposes in America and Great Britain.”
“In Continental Europe… [they] used a slightly different definition of the point as its standard - the didot point - and its equivalent to the 12 pt pica, the cicero. The Didot system has become the standard system in Europe. Didot points and picas are some seven per cent larger than Anglo-American points and picas.
Well, it’s just not much use writing a boring blog post about printing and inks and how many signatures it takes to layout your magazine, when all the news this week is Obama, Obama, Obama.
But here is an interesting tidbit about the U.S. election this week: Newspapers all over the country ran out of stock. It seems everybody wanted a newspaper of Obama’s victory as a souvenir or to use as a time capsule.
Did you get yours?
PDF magazines are a great promotional tool used by companies and collectives.
Numerous visual arts publications from around the world are available for you to draw inspiration courtesy of Smashing Magazine’s post on PDF magazines.
These magazines serve as excellent sources of both conceptual and visual design. Furthermore, it’s both interesting and important to know what other artists do — to explore new artistic style, learn new techniques and make new contacts. Or flip through these pages to discover new visual solutions and styles.
Don’t forget to wear brightly coloured costumes on your night out. Or, if you are dressed as the batman, stick some fluorescent tape on your cape or arms or both.
I see you out there, acting as parent guardian to Superman and some sort of cat creature (details to be worked out).
For the last few months, we have had the occasional client phone us up and ask why we had not replied to their mail. After changing our email provider and pulling our hair out on more than one occasion, we found out why some mail was not being delivered: Some of Shaw’s DNS servers on the internet did not have their MX record updated properly.
To make a loooong story short: About 5% of our mail wasn’t being delivered, with no error messages being sent. So Shaw has promised to delete the incorrect MX record today, with the result that we should received all of our mail.
If you are one of our clients who experienced this frustrating problem, please accept our apologies. It should be fixed now.
It’s that time of the year again - literally - as the graphic designers fire up their Adobe Suite and get to work making calendars. To help them out, here are some calendar templates available for download from designbliss.
Movie posters are art and, unfortunately, often lost and forgotten. Displayed in theatres only, movie posters had the same function as a menu in a restaurant: what feast can I enjoy this evening? Nowadays, movie posters play a big role in cinema memorabilia collections.
They have lost the “informative” tone to wear a more artistic and decorative dress. Some posters can be dark or try to frighten the audience, others bedazzling with bright colors; some can be someway informative, while others can be fully teasing and may provide you only the date when movie will be released, even if you may not know what the movie is about.
Smashing Magazine present 50 movie posters for your design inspiration.
