Archive for June, 2011
Would an airplane pilot not do a preflight check before take-off? Of course not. In similar fashion, graphic designers, layout artisists and prepress operators should also be preflighting their DTP page layout documents before processing for print or even online advertising use.Thus it is with great pleasure that we learn of Markzware’s new release; FlightCheck Professional v6.75 for Macintosh! This stand-alone app will now preflight CS5 Adobe Creative Suite 5 file formats such as InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and associated image types and of course Acrobat PDF documents. This quality assurance tool can check other desktop publishing layouts, such as QuarkXPress and EPS files as well and is a must-have for any serious graphic arts player.David Steinberg, technical support and systems specialist at Intrigue Design said,
Adobe Creative Suite 5 Desktop Publishing File Formats and all lower versions of CS (CS4, CS3, etc) can now be fully preflighted with Markzware’s new FlightCheck Professional v6.75.
Quality in print is very important. Unlike on the Internet, where you can quickly edit and fix design problems like color mode, typography positioning or missing images, a printed document is set in concrete. By using affordable tools like FlightCheck, you can guarantee that your color brochures, business cards and booklets will output correctly to ink on paper the first time.You can read the full press release announcing this powerful preflight tool from Markzware here:
Markzware Announces Upgrade for FlightCheck With Adobe CS5 Support
Here are a few thoughts on folding brochures or any other printed products. Paper always has a grain direction. Folding with the grain direction will give you a cleaner fold with less cracking. We all have seen brochures that are cracking on the folds. How do you reduce cracking? Folding with the grain will help.
Also, if you are dealing with heavy paper(let’s say over 100# book) you need to score or crease the paper with a machine to help train the fold to prevent or minimize cracking. Our rule of thumb is a brochure on 80# book may or may not need to score. Anything heavier than 80# book or any weight of cover will need to be scored. Scoring will minimize cracking but will not always eliminate it on the printed product. Cracking on printed products is most noticeable when there is ink over the folds. Especially darker inks.
Scoring can be done on a letterpress or on the actual folder or other machines that crease the paper. Letterpress scoring is the best quality score you can do. On cross grain folding, I would highly recommend scoring of some method to reduce or elimininate cracking.