Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, takes another leave of absence from the company for medical reasons.
It seems Jobs will be handing over day to day operations to Tim Cook who handled the reigns the Last time Jobs was out. Through an email sent to his staff, he said he would still remain CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company. The board of directors has granted him medical leave of absence to focus on his health.
It should be interesting to see what the stock does tomorrow when the markets open as they were closed today in observance of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday today. Apple currently trades at over $300 a share and became the second most valuable company in the world at that landmark.
Bleed is one of the most important factors in any successful design. If you don’t factor it in, it can ruin your design. First lets explain bleed. Wikipedia defines bleed as “printing that goes beyond the edge of the sheet after trimming.” To be more specific with an example if you have an image or a background color that goes to the edge of your printed page, the bleed is the portion of that color and/or image that goes beyond the trim.
The standard amount of bleed in offset printing is 1/8 inch. This amount allows the printer a little variance during the bindery and trimming functions. Documents are typically cut in stacks of hundreds so the trim can vary slightly. Bleed allows for this variance so raw white paper doesn’t show on the edge of your design.
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In my time in this business I have found that many people are unsure of the difference between these two functions in InDesign. Typically the new users will have a tendency to use the Transparency function for everything. Several inquiries to the designers and marketing people creating these jobs revealed the reason why in most instances… they didn’t know about the tint function.
This post and a video tutorial on the same subject will go into the differences. Tint should always be used to achieve a percentage of a color whenever possible. The Tint function allows you to adjust the value of the color while keeping the opacity at 100% so if you have headline type that crosses a photograph the photo will NOT show through the type.
With Transparency you do not adjust the tint, you only adjust the opacity which can be hard to match at a later date and even harder to get to print without problems, especially with spot colors. The Tint function is located in the swatches palette in the upper right corner. If the effect you are after is transparency (or adjusting the opacity) then by all means use the transparency function! I hope this will help some of our valued clients be more aware of the correct way to set up tints in a file.
One thing so many designers forget is to check work properly before sending it off to be printed. I always tell my staff to put finished projects to the side and work on something else for a bit before the final proofing stage. It is very easy to not see the forest for the trees as the old saying goes.
If time does not permit another good option is to have a co-worker look over the project for you. Even if this person is not a designer they may see some detail that was missed. The best possible way for them to view it is to create a full mock-up on oversize paper. Then you trim it down to size checking bleeds, fold as needed and pass it around. This will assist in making sure bleed, folds and margins are correct.
Another forgotten detail is spell check, A rule of thumb to get in to is to always run spell check before you make a PDF or a mock up, you can NEVER spell check too much! It’s much easier to correct the spelling BEFORE the project is printed!
The word on the street is that, effective January 4th, Adobe will discontinue the worldwide Adobe Partner Connection Print Service Program. The reason stated? rumor has it… membership decline. It even stated on the Adobe Partners site [link] that they are no longer accepting applications. The program was a benefit to many small print shops around the world but it seems Adobe is trimming the fat just like every other organization out there.
The bleed is the additional area of an image that overlaps the edge of the page and gets trimmed off. In many cases where designers forget to add bleed the cut can be off a fraction of an inch and raw paper can shows as a “white line” and the wonderful design will be ruined!
The safe area excludes 1/8 inch around the edge of the document to help you make sure your type and other design elements don’t get too close to the edge of the document and possibly get cut off.
Make sure to match your design up to one of our templates and verify you have the bleed and clear areas. Our templates are over sized on purpose and have the bleed and safe areas clearly marked.
To use one of our PDF templates go to our web site and download the appropriate PDF. Open the PDF and print out the file so you will have the instructions at hand.
At this point set up your document in the program of your choice to the size specified on the template. The next step is to import the template as an image file so you can reference safe areas, bleed and also utilize the folding guides if needed. Once you have set up your document make sure you delete the template layer before you create a high resolution PDF file to upload to us.
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