Preface

For the past twenty-five years, I have worked extensively in the commercial printing industry and also as a graphic designer, both in the US and in England. I am constantly running into other graphic designers who have a three-year degree course or similarly extensive training behind them, or who have even been working in the industry for years, but who nevertheless have little or no idea about the actual requirements of the printing process. As a result, every time they send a job to their printers, they experience nail-biting anxiety because they don’t know exactly how it is going to turn out.

The gray areas that cause this anxiety include dot gain, image calibration, trapping, the use of CMYK vs. RGB, and generating error-free PDF documents for the printer.

This book explains all of these misunderstood areas, and more, in such a way as to provide an overview of the entire process, from error-free digital creation right through to commercial printing. It includes detailed instructions that will enable anyone, even complete beginners, to do the necessary work for themselves before the job is sent to the print shop.

I currently hold the ACE (Adobe Certified Expert) qualification in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, and Flash, and, as well as writing books on this subject matter, I teach intensive one- and two-day training courses, covering skill levels from complete beginner to advanced, in all those applications as well as in QuarkXPress and CorelDRAW.

I also teach one- and two-day Digital Repro and Prepress courses specifically aimed at graphic designers, and offer private consultation and troubleshooting on questions relating to graphics, printing, and print production.

If you would like to know more, please visit my website (www.markgatter.co.uk) or e-mail me ([email protected]).

Layouts of type cases—divided wooden drawers, each compartment holding metal-block characters of a single font in a specific point size.

A computer keyboard layout: Every character you want, in all the available fonts, any time you want it.