OUGD504: Print Workshop

Print workshop- For further reference ie. print briefs (session 1)

Commercial Print

Offset Lithography- 3 plates

Digital Printing

Screen Printing 

Use of colour in the software- print: CMYK and screen RGB.

4 Litho plates: cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black) 

These are applied to the stock in this order. Designing for print means that we need to think about those colours as inks. 

It is best to delete the swatches you are not using so the colours shown are your own. Creating colour swatches:

By creating a global colour (has a white corner). All the shapes and artwork using this colour can be changed at once rather than individually. 

Spot colour is different to cmyk. It is similar to screen printing because you can mix your own colours rather than using different printing plates. Spot colours can be used to make a colour match to a particular brand (pantone). 

To access Pantone colours on illustrator: 

To change this colour to a spot colour:

It will then have a dot in the corner of the square along with the white triangle. 

You can save the colours as a swatch palette so you can move these swatches between different pieces of adobe software such as illustrator and indesign. Tints and patterns/ gradients cannot be saved across the various types of software. 

From todays session we looked at process colours (cmyk), global swatches such as pantone which can be automatically updated across artwork and spot colours which is a specific ink. The next session will be more focussed on photography and photoshop in terms of spot colours being applied to imagery.