HOVR Magazine Advertisement
XG Magazine, New Delhi, India
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Up until now all the work developed for HOVR included web design and development and some miscellaneous support projects. Nothing printed.
When Vipul tentatively approached me about developing a magazine ad for HOVR and asked if I designed print stuff, I was a tad surprised. I suppose that with the sheer volume of web work I do perhaps it's not obvious that printed materials also go through the production queue. In fact, I've been designing professional print work as far back as 1996.
PRINTING PREFERENCES
Printed materials have the potential to be much higher resolution. I aim for 350 and 400 dpi (dots per inch) for images as a rule, with film and printer line screen preferably closer to 200 lpi (lines per inch). Of course it does depends on the printer's specification and capabilities, but the sharper the better. The drawback to print is that the CMYK color gamut (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black overprint to form the spectrum) is more limited in the total range of color that can be displayed, compared its on-screen counterpart the RGB color gamut. Pantone improved upon this by introducing the Hexachrome printing processes with two additional printing inks (orange and green) to increase the range of possible colors. Nowadays, limitations inherent with reflective inks are being remedied with RGB print processes that expose photographic paper with laser light to produce eye-popping, realistic color images. I've used this method for one of M7's trade show booth posters and the results are stunning. As far as I know, this technology is only being used on large-format print jobs like posters, billboards and trade show booths because the rendering process is slow compared to high-speed digital and offset printing.
GIMME THE SPECS
So anyway, I was pretty stoked that HOVR wanted me to do a magazine advertisement. I even gave them a special deal: half price! Sure, they're a great client, but anything that deviates from the ordinary grind piques my interest and may get high priority (hint hint). Vipul gave me the mechanical specifications doc in PDF format and I was a happy clam. I like getting specs ’coz it means I get get it precisely right. India is on the Metric system and the doc covered exactly how to prep the files for print.
The design files were submitted to XG and they reported that the files looked fine and were ready for print! Got a print job you need done right the first time?