Poster design.

Deliverance

I'm looking to create a poster for a club. The design of the actual poster is not an issue as yet, as it is early days and the deadline is far off. I'm experienced in screen based stuff but have limited knowledge of designing with print in mind. Would 300dpi /CMYK be ok in photoshop or Illustrator in your opinion or is there much more to consider? (I suspect there is), thanks for any advice or help on this.

Oh and Ps: if it is ok I might throw up the ongoing design once it gets going for critisism and advice if that's ok.

rockbeer

300dpi/cmyk is the standard setup for most print work. Start off with this and you should be fine. However as you go along you'll need to think about colour management, hardware calibration, colour matching profiles etc. Most likely about the time you get your first proof back from the printer and it looks nothing like what's on your screen!

Your printer will advise on what cmyk profile best suits their setup, so the sooner you decide on a printer the fewer adjustments you might end up having to make. But don't let any of this hold you up from starting your design. Just calibrate your monitor as well as you can and get started.

Deliverance

rockbeer wrote: »

300dpi/cmyk is the standard setup for most print work. Start off with this and you should be fine. However as you go along you'll need to think about colour management, hardware calibration, colour matching profiles etc. Most likely about the time you get your first proof back from the printer and it looks nothing like what's on your screen!

Your printer will advise on what cmyk profile best suits their setup, so the sooner you decide on a printer the fewer adjustments you might end up having to make. But don't let any of this hold you up from starting your design. Just calibrate your monitor as well as you can and get started.

Thanks for that, that is good advice. the dpi/cmyk I can do. As for the rest I'll do a bit of research on that, any good links I shoud be looking at? Thanks again.

rockbeer

Deliverance wrote: »

Thanks for that, that is good advice. the dpi/cmyk I can do. As for the rest I'll do a bit of research on that, any good links I shoud be looking at? Thanks again.

Have a look at the digital fine print, especially chapters 4 & 5. Try and read it sometime when you've got loads of energy, the going's tough enough.

The style's a bit wearing but [URL=http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/Photoshop/The-Critically-Important-Color-and-Gamma-Calibration-Article/[/URL] The Critically Important Color and Gamma Calibration Article[/URL] might also be worth a look.

If you can't stand any of that you can always use commercial printers colour charts to help avoid any nasty surprises.

Deliverance

rockbeer wrote: »

Have a look at the digital fine print, especially chapters 4 & 5. Try and read it sometime when you've got loads of energy, the going's tough enough.

The style's a bit wearing but [URL=http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/Photoshop/The-Critically-Important-Color-and-Gamma-Calibration-Article/[/URL] The Critically Important Color and Gamma Calibration Article[/URL] might also be worth a look.

If you can't stand any of that you can always use commercial printers colour charts to help avoid any nasty surprises.

Nice one, there is obviously a lot more work to this than meets the eye, I design for screen based stuff mostly, Cheers for the advice.

rockbeer

No problem. Screen's so much simpler, what you see is what you get. Inks are a whole different ballgame, unfortunately.

It's not that bad once you get to grips with it. Honestly

experiMental

First of all, calibrate the white colour in Photoshop or illustrator. Fill the screen with white colour and adjust your monitor to suit it.

The default white colour (RGB 255,255,255) prints off as white on all printers, no matter what their colour profiles are.

Even if your poster doesn't contain white colour, make an extra area next to your poster and fill it with white colour. Then, adjust the lightness and contrast of your poster by using white colour as a guideline.

After this, adjust the hue and saturation of your image. It might contain 1 or 2 or 3 million colours, so use Photoshop or Illustrator to reduce the amount of colours, as some printers don't reproduce that pallette, even at higher resolutions.

If you're using Illustrator, try to use as many Pantone colours as possible. These can be accessed in the pallette menu. These are reproduced on the printers just as you see them on your screen.

Hope this helps

JohnnyBlaze

craic man,
another thing you should consider when your designing stuff for print is your cutting margin and your bleed. design your poster with 3 - 5mm extra all around to allow for paper expansion and cutting errors. same applies inside the actual poster area. keep a within a margin of 5mm from the edge so no information will be lost during the printing process. Watch out for shadow effects and things. sometimes what you see on screen wont come out correct on paper.

Deliverance

Cheers lads very professional useful replies from all of ye. I'm printing of this page and looking into the links. Much appreciated, feel much more confident about the print issue now.