Everyone needs a website right?  Well if you judge your answer based off of some of the sites out there on the internet the answer is most definitely…no.  You on the other hand probably do need a website because you’re here!  We can help you design a site from the ground up no matter what you objective is.  Are you a brick and mortar retailer looking to move your business online?  How about a local handyman that needs a good way to show off past projects to clients?  You might even be a local non-profit organization looking to extend the reach of your programs world wide?  We can help no matter what your intent is!

We regularly consult clients on the ins and outs of the internet and what it can do for you.  Don’t worry, we’re fluent in both plain english and geek so it’s easy for us to translate PHP, HTML, and Jquery into concepts that you can understand.  More importantly we can show you how these funny little letters can help you build your business, wow potential clients, and give the world access to you!  Contact us today and let’s get started.

Although Michael G Designs does a lot of web design projects, we also do our fair share of print design. We’ve discovered over the years that like any other industry the print industry has a lot of terminology that doesn’t translate well to most customers. You simply want a sharp looking ad that is going to attract more business, but your designer or printer is asking for camera ready art that is setup to bleed in CMYK format. What does it all mean? Let’s break it down…

One of the first requirements you’ll usually run into when submitting artwork or samples to be used in a print design job is DPI. DPI stands for Dots Per Inch and is just that, how many dots of ink per inch. Obviously the higher the number dots the sharper the image will be. Most items that are submitted for a print job must be at least 300 dpi. Graphics on the web on the other hand show up quite crisply at 72 dpi. This is to save on the size of the files used on the web and increase the speed at which your webpage loads. Ever visited a webpage where the photos take FOREVER to load? This may be because they’re using the full print quality photo instead of one optimized for the web at a lower dpi.

Now how do you tell what DPI a file you’re submitting is? Luckily this had been made very easy in Windows since Windows 98. Simply take the image that you’re trying to use and right click on the file. Select properties and then click properties -> summary -> advanced. You will see a window that resembles the image to the right.

As you can tell this particular image is 96 DPI, which is perfectly acceptable for use on a website, but not nearly good enough quality for printing. Another factor to consider when submitting images to use for a print job is what format the image is in. Most items that you see on the internet are JPG’s (commonly pronounced as Jay Pegs) or GIF’s (Think Gifts with a silent t). These formats are used because they offer compression to condense the size of the image file. This again is to speed up the load time of a webpage. This compression compromises print design however. It usually leads to lower quality results, blurry images, or incorrect coloring showing up in the final printed image.

A much better option for print design is an uncompressed TIF file, pronounced just like it looks. Other option you may see requested are EPS files or Press Ready PDF’s. These are typically used in very specific instances and your designer or printer should help you with these types of files.

So that tackles DPI and the best file types to submit artwork in, but what does CMYK mean? To keep it simple just think back to your days in elementary art class in school. You learned the when you mix primary colors you can make other colors, yellow and blue make green for example. This is exactly how most print materials are created. You can’t expect that huge press equipment is loaded with every ink imagianable. In fact most printing presses use the exact same colors your printer at home or in the office does: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. By mixing these 4 colors (or by printing tiny dots of these colors immediately next to each other) a press is able to create any color you can see. This is why artwork submitted has to be in CMYK format, so that the colors you used to create your artwork are the same colors that will be used to print it. Most designers (us included) will make sure that when we submit artwork to a printer it is in CMYK format, even if it means converting what we received from a customer. What the customer has to realize is that a color is going to be different from their monitor to the printing press. If you print the file on your printer is going to be different still from what comes out from the press or even another printer. There are methods for solving this so that the color you see on screen is the same that will come out of your printer and also matches what comes out of a printing press. It requires however very specific equipment and is still fairly expensive. You simply have to trust that when something is designed in a shade of blue, it’s going to be fairly close to that shade of blue when printed on a press. 99% of folks won’t see a difference.

Now what about this bleeding terminology? Is there some sort of blood transfusion going on with your artwork? Not hardly. Bleeding simply means that the artwork is setup in such a way that it runs off the edge of the paper it is being printed on. Normally in a press run it doesn’t actually run off the edge of the paper, but instead the paper is cut so that it appears to have been printed to the edge. This allows for higher quality results than a piece of equipment that has to be calibrated to print exactly to the edge of a sheet of paper with no errors, especially if it’s for a press run of tens of thousands of pages.

Usually when a bleed is requested it’s prefaced by a measurement, such as a 1/4 inch or 1/8 inch bleed. These are the standard measurements for bleeds. This simply means that the artwork is setup to extend beyond the edge of the page by 1/4 or 1/8 of an inch. Items with bleeds usually cost more because of the cutting involved, and that this bleeding ink may take up room where another item could have been printed. Take business cards for example. These items are usually printed any where from 4 to 20 cards per page in quantities of 1000 pages. If your business card has a bleed off the top and bottom of the card it’s running ink into 2 spots for other cards. The printer has to recoup the cost of that wasted ink and paper.

When it comes to print termonolgy, or web termonology for that matter, we’re here to help. We can design anything from a simple business card, to a complex brochure or magazine ad. Let us help you make your business look better today! Contact us for a quote or with any questions you may have.