I had a client just like this the other day (alas not the only one) but this one was fairly difficult to deal with. He also requested something that was graphically incorrect and even almost impossible to realise. It wasn’t just about a colour that doesn’t go well with another. It was a request that was very similar to asking to set a fire by throwing cold water on wood.

The job comes on my desk in the morning, at 9:30 with the request that I get it done by 11am. The client calls at 10:45 asking me if I did it…

After the first draft, which was exactly per his instructions, he decided he didn’t like it and changed the instructions. Of course, what he asked wasn’t possible, but it was nevertheless my fault. He also went on about how he waited from 10:15 to 11am for my draft, to get something he didn’t like. Following the new instructions, still fairly impossible to realise, I tried to do them as quickly as possible, also explaning to him that I will refine them once he decides on one. By 13:00, he had 5 drafts to choose from.

He still wasn’t happy.

I don’t think I ever had so many problems with a client before. Eventually I just said one of our salesmen will contact him and we cancelled the job, and encouraged him to go to the other designer he really wanted to go to and with whom he had previous arrangements (which was the main reason of his impossible requests to me). Yet, the cherry on the candle: “Your designers take 5 minutes to make drafts, they don’t even spend time to work on them.” However it was by HIS request that I speeded up a job I already did quickly, and that others also saw and thought was well done.

Furthermore whoever contacted him didn’t have a contract. So I lost more than half a day in the end for a job that didn’t result into any income for the company. Needless to say, I had other things to take care of, one of them being 3 editions of a magazine.

This should be a lesson about spec work. Always have a contract (in this situation, I wasn’t the one taking care of it). Always specify the number of changes, drafts or hours in the contract. And when people ask you to do something in very little time, too little for the job you are being asked to do, try to explain to them that it requires time to do something properly, because in the end, as this very example showed, even they won’t be happy about it and will say you don’t even care for their job, even when you try to suggest to them better solutions, which I did.

This client wanted me to spend more time to take care of his job, but he didn’t have time to allow me that. I consider myself a decent designer, but that is out of my reach still.

But printed material isn’t the only thing that can give you inspiration. Stephanie Orma in her article Crank up Your Design Radar over at Smashing Magazine tells us:

No one understands the statement, “design is everywhere” better than us designers. But comprehension and integration are two totally separate acts. From food packaging, to billboards, to book covers, catalogs, websites, and everything in between, we spend the majority of our waking hours on our computers designing and/or looking at these designs through the portals of our monitors. But when the computer is shut down, does your “design radar” go off-line, as well?

Do you see design everywhere? Where do you get your ideas from? Are you sure you are not overlooking sources of inspiration? The article on Smashing Magazine is certainly a good read. You will realise there are so many things you just overlooked, many ideas just around the corner screaming, “Look at me!” and you just shoved them aside!

My portfolio is still visible, but it also needs an update. You can still get hold of me me through the contact form to see my most up to date work, or hop to Artician to see some bits and bops I recently uploaded. Contacting me directly is still the best way to see my most recent work.

Anyway, once the work is done, I’ll let you know!

I remember some time ago I was a fairly big supporter of the fact that design is art, and posted a poll in the About Desktop Publishing forum. While I still think that, I view this in a different way now.

Art is often regarded as the expression of self. It has to comunicate something, and that communication will be very subjective to the beholder, but what you communicate as artist is your message, something that was created by your mind and you realise through artistic means. The means you use can be paintings, drawings, or any number of graphical arts that can include the use of graphics software.

That’s where people get confused. “Graphical Arts” are very different from “Graphic Design.” In Graphic Design you use the artistic tools to communicate a message, like you would do for art, but while you might achieve that through your ideas, you are not trying to convey your own personal message.

Being a designer means first and foremost being a communication counsellor. Your client wants to get somewhere and it’s your job to make sure he gets there the best way possible. Of course you have your own taste and your own style, but that cannot and must not compromise what the client wants to communicate. You are a problem solver, you are not an additional problem the client needs to deal with. I know this is a much colder view of design, but even with this view in mind, you are still able to use your creativity.

Sometimes your solution will not satisfy your client. It may be because your client has different tastes, yet you know that your design concept communicates his message. Sometimes your design might actually not communicate what the client wants. It is possible. If you are a real professional, you are able to take the client’s input and decide whether it’s time to change what you have done, or to put on your counsellor hat and tell the client why your solution works best. This has to be an honest look, and you cannot afford to simply say, “I am misunderstood” and keep going your way. You will lose clients.

If you cannot objectively look at what you have done, then you are not doing design, but you are doing a work of art, as art is very subjective. Design is objective… to a degree. Personal taste and style will always influence anything that has to do with creativity.

The trick is to learn how to channel that creativity.

A very important step in achieving this is to understand the client’s brief. Ask questions, make sure you fully grasp the message yourself. Then it will prove easier to think of ideas that carry that message. It’s hard to relay a phone message to a colleague, if the line of your cell phone was breaking up and you didn’t understand half of what was said, right?

So, still half sleeping, I raise an eyebrow and think, “Maybe they are not talking about imaging.”

A third guy joins in and the same girl asks, “Since you have already studied it, what is ‘noise?’” He answers that he’s going to look at his notes and opens his copybook, he goes through his pages and says, “It’s something that doesn’t belong to a photo–then he looks at them and adds–Like a wrong colour or something.”

At that point I think, “Wait a minute” I kinda wake up and say, “Noise is dots on a photo, or scratches that don’t belong to the image.” Very simplified explanation of course and the word “dot” in the Italian version of that sentence makes more sense. The proper definition is here.

So I sit and think, “What the hell are people teaching at school?” And that’s when I think that having done tailored courses and on the job training actually helped me more than my design school. I thought my school was bad, but it doesn’t seem the only one.

What do you feel has helped you the most in your education?

A solution to this can be adding a border around type. Applications such as Illustrator, Corel Draw, InDesign and others allow you to do that. However there is a catch, which I discovered not long ago while working a my company’s logo (that I didn’t design).

When I was first hired by this company I was told that sometimes the logo looks thinner than it should. They had asked the designer to make it bolder when it was designed, so he added a stroke around the text since he had no bold version of the font (Andale Mono). The text in the logo is outlined by the way. Despite this the logo often just looked thinner than it should have.

One day I was making some tags for a packaging project and I used the logo. Since the tags were small, I had to shrink the logo. I made my PDF, did my preflight checks in Adobe Acrobat Professional and no matter what I did I kept getting an error about a stroke being less than 0.25 pt. For those who don’t know, printing a stroke or a line that is less wide than 0.25 pt often will not print because it’s too thin. Finally I figured out that the stroke was around the logo. In the original file, since the logo is bigger, the stroke is wider than 1pt, but once the logo is resized it becomes a hairline, thus being ignored by the printers’ RIP once it goes to press. That was why the logo was thinner sometimes. It wasn’t the designer taking “artistic license” it was just a technical problem.

Moral of the story: don’t use faux bold or italics, and when you use a stroke around text to simulate the bold version make sure you keep in mind how the design, logo, whatever you are doing may be used in the future. If the logo/graphic will be made very small, then try not to use strokes around text as it may not be printed.

You are required to have Adobe Acrobat Professional, Adobe PS or any other driver that will allow you to make PostScript or PDF files. You will not be able to use the built-in Export to PDF option in InDesign or Export Layout as… in QuarkXPress to do what is described in this tutorial. With InDesign and Illustrator you will also have to produce separated files to be able to change screen angles.

Changing Screen Angles in InDesign and Illustrator

Those two programs are definitely the most straight forward when we talk about changing screen angles. You do almost the same thing with both programs. Here you can see the screenshot of InDesign’s Print window and you can see Illustrator’s Print window here.

1. Go to File > Print. The Print window will show up. Choose PostScript File, Adobe PDF or whatever other printer allows you to either create PostScript files in the Printer option which is at the top of the window. Note that choosing Adobe PDF will not create a PDF file, it will create a PostScript file also.
2. Click on the Output tab. In the Colour option, choose In-RIP Separations (the most common separations method).
3. As you can see in this screenshot, there are 5 inks—the 4 process colours and 1 spot colour. Click on the spot colour and change screen angle and frequency. If you are not using cyan, you can just use the screen angle and frequency used by cyan, otherwise use the ones for magenta and yellow. If you are using all the colours, it is best to consult with your printer. You will usually need to make sure there is a difference of 30º amongst the screens.
4. Save to PostScript and you are done.
5. Don’t forget to Distill the file to PDF before you send it to your printer.

Note: Once you have chosen to separate your file and you have changed the screen angle of your inks, you can then choose to output your file as a composite. Once you choose Composite CMYK in the Colour option though, you will notice that you are no longer able to edit the screen angles and frequency of your inks. Yet if you choose Separations again you will see that your changes have been recorded. I suspect this means that you are able to create composite files with custom screen angles with InDesign and Illstrator, but I am not totally sure. If you have any information about this, please fill in the comment form below and let me know.

Changing Screen Angles in QuarkXPress

Unfortunately with QuarkXPress and Photoshop changing screen angles isn’t as straight forward as it is with InDesign and Illustrator, but it can be done easily. To change screen angles with QuarkXPress:

1. Go to File > Print. The Print window will show up on your screen. Click on Printer.
2. The Printer window will come up. Choose a printer that will allow you to either make PDFs or PostScript files as I mentioned at the beginning of this article (see illustration). Click on Print. If you have chosen Adobe PDF, you will be asked where to save your PDF file. Once you specified it, you will not yet create the file until you finished all the steps I am describing. So go ahead, name your file and press OK. QuarkXPress will save it wherever you told it to, once you have done all the needed steps. In the Printer window, click Print. Again, you will only be brought back to the original Print window mentioned in step 1, QuarkXPress will not yet create the file.
3. Now that you are back to the original Print window, click on the Setup tab and choose either Adobe PDF or Generic Colour as your printer description unless otherwise advised by your printer.
4. Click on the Ouput tab. To change the screen angle of an ink, first select the ink, then click on Angle and choose Other. You will be prompted to enter your custom screen angle. Do the same with the frequency.
5. Press Print and your PDF or PostScript file will be created.

Changing Screen Angles in Photoshop

Photoshop doesn’t take into consideration which printer you are using or whether you are separating your file. It just lets you change screen angles with no fuss.

1. Go to File > Print with Preview. Check Show More Options. Straight under it, you will see a drop down menu set by default to Colour Management. Click on that menu and choose Output.
2. A new set of options will appear. Click on screen. When the Halftone Screens window shows up, uncheck the Use Printer’s Default Screen option. You can now change the screen angle and frequency of your inks (see illustration).

Summary

Here is how you change screen angles in InDesign, QuarkXPress, Illustrator and Photoshop. Though most printers will do this for you, it is always good to know what screen angles and frequency are, how they can affect the print quality of your jobs and how to deal with them in case nobody else will do that for you.

Ink is layed on paper in form of tiny little dots that, combining each other, give you the illusion of continuos colour. You have a number of black dots, cyan dots, magenta dots and yellow dots that are printed on paper and combine to produce your orange, your brown, your red and all the other colours that can be obtained by mixing CMYK.

Creating Printing Plates

To create plates, some printers will use films, others will simply make them straight from a computer (also known as Computer To Plate process or CTP). For ease of understanding, I am going to take up the process which uses films.

Prior to separating your job into cyan, magenta, yellow and black, your printer’s service bureau will plan, or impose, your job so that it can be printed on the press. For example, if you are printing a 20 page magazine, the printer will place the pages so that they fit into the bigger sheet of the press and so that once your pages are trimmed and folded, they all fall back into sequence to give you the final product of your 20 page magazine.

Once your design is planned, the printer will send it to their imagesetter, i.e., a special kind of “printer” which creates the films, as a separated job. The printer’s imagesetter will produce a film for cyan, one for magenta, one for yellow and one for black. With positive films, there will be more dots where the darker areas are and less dots to none in the lighter areas or areas that have no colour. With negative films it’s the other way around.

Films are then placed on the plates that will be used to print your job. The plates are hit with UV light which will go through the areas of the films with less dots in more quantity. The films are effectively screening the plates, allowing the UV light to only hit certain areas of the plate. The resultant pattern of dots is therefore called screen, or halftone screen, as with this system you are able to create tints and shades of colours, instead of just creating solid colours with no shades in between—the bigger and the closer the dots on your sheet of paper, the darker your colours will be.

Screen Angles and Screen Frequency

The dots within a screen also form lines. The number of lines in one inch is called line frequency, or screen frequency, also known as LPI (Lines Per Inch). Generally the higher the LPI the finer your halftone will be, i.e., your colours will blend better with each other. However you need to keep in mind the resolution of the printer that will output the job when setting LPI.

Each screen must have different angles and line frequency to prevent dots from overlapping. If dots overlap too much, colours don’t mix well and you get the so called moire effect.

When printing CMYK images, you shouldn’t have a problem with the moire effect. Usually the defaults in your layout application will work fine. It’s when you start using spot colours, which it is usually the case in duotone images, that you might get trouble. Look at the screenshot on the left. I took InDesign’s Print window as an example in this case. The “New Swatch Colour” ink has the same angle and frequency of the black plate. That will very likely create the unwanted moire effect. Unless you printer’s service bureau handles this for you (and most of them do), you will have to change the screen screen angle and frequency manually.

In the next article I will explain how to change screen angle and freequency in InDesign, QuarkXPress, Photoshop and Illustrator.

Jacci Howard Bear has written a 6 day course that will give you guidelines, tips and directions that will help you put together a portfolio which will speak for itself. As she puts it:

“Desktop publishing or graphic design portfolios should be more than just a few samples thrown into any old folder. Potential employers or clients use examples of your work to help determine whether they want to hire you. The samples you choose for graphic design portfolios and how you present them can affect whether or not you get the job.”

This is an email course with lessons sent to you daily, however you can do the course at your own pace.

Remember that if you can’t present a good image of yourself, others won’t be compelled to put theirs in your hands.

Sue Chastain of About Graphics Software presents us a comprehensive and very hard to beat overview of the Suite, so I am not going to repeat what she has one, and, without any more delay, I encourage you to see the overview for yourself.