Those Fabulous Fonts
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Time after time I have customers who want their products to look “like the one in the picture”, salespeople who bring in orders to look like the client’s business card and clients in general who give me printed materials that they want reproduced. I have been given printed samples with a certain font type styles and from four letters I am supposed to figure out what font it is. On top of that I am expected to whip the design out in an hour so that the price doesn’t go into orbit. Then I spend 20 minutes just explaining why what they want me to do is not so easy and that I need more information, the fonts and good quality photos.
So let’s take just a minute and talk about the fonts that it takes to create a file that is useful for the printer. Fonts are type styles that computers use to create letters and numbers and other symbols. Fonts styles are called typefaces. In typography, a typeface is a set of one or more fonts designed with stylistic unity, each comprising a coordinated set of glyphs. The distinction between font and typeface is that a font designates a specific member of a type family such as roman, boldface, or italic type, while typeface designates a consistent visual appearance or style which can be a “family” or related set of fonts. For example, a given typeface such as Arial may include roman, bold, and italic fonts.
To recreate a typeface from printed material takes hours and to find it among thousands of available fonts many hours more. The original creation of a piece can take fonts and manipulate them to different heights, thicknesses and spacing. That creates additional problems for the recreation without the typeface (or font) installed on the designer’s computer.
So if you find a font you like, find out what the name of the font is or if possible get a copy of it, but that is not always possible. Creators of fonts also want to get paid for their work so many times fonts are registered to the computer it is installed on and cannot be installed on another. This protects the author of the font from his work being freely shared and not getting paid for his work in the long run. This also creates a uniqueness from the designer who designs the piece and limits its “recreatability” to designers who are willing to pay for fonts.
One other little problem with fonts…when creating a design and preparing it for the printer, pdf files are very popular, especially for digital printers, however unless the font is embedded into the document or turned into “outlines” it will change to whatever font that is installed on the computer that the printer opens it with and there goes all your design work out the window. The special font used will not show up on the printed work unless embedded or converted to outlines.
So you see, design work is more than just creating the work on your home computer and giving the file to your printer to print. Check back again for more information about common pitfalls that make publishing a bit more difficult than you might have imagined.
No LITE for me! PLEASE!!!
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I want them fat, heavy, and gordo!! Anything but LITE!!! Of course, I am talking about the size of a picture file needed to make a nice looking print. I had a client come in and complain that the proof I sent to him had pixeled edges on one of the photos and that it needed to be cleaned up. First of all I told him that the first thing we needed to do was agree on the color, then I needed a hi-resolution photo before I could finish the job. Printed work must be at least 250 ppi but better 300 ppi. He said he thought the one he sent was 300 ppi so I said let’s take a look. When I found the picture he sent, immediately I told him that it was a web photo of only 72 ppi and would not work. Just looking at the size of the file told me that it was low-res. at 22 KB there is not much that you can expect from it.
72 ppi (pixels per inch, or dpi dots per inch) is good for websites. They download fast, look good on screen, but they are horrible on paper. This is typical though, every one seems to want lite everything including pictures but I guarantee you this is were you want high calorie resolution photos. Almost forgot, I am talking about photos, not food. Good quality photographs usually require 300 pixels per inch when printed.
Oh well, just make sure when you want to produce clean printed material that you use hi-res photos, or else….you need not complain about pixeled ( fuzzy photos.) Hey until next time, Don’t fall into any pitfalls when you are publishing!!