Pre-Press – Project 2

Tags

advertising design, assignment design, creative design, design education, design process, design students, graphic design, prepress, presentation boards

Our Pre-Press class was designed to educate and train our students in the proper preparation of files for commercial offset printing and other areas of Design production. It was never intended for highly creative portfolio preparation. Each project has a specific goal in training the students in a new method of print production. As an example, the first project is simply recreating an existing brochure to introduce the students to proper file preparation on one color and four color production including correct file resolutions, the difference between RGB and CMYK, scanning and print mark up. There is absolutely no creativity in this project. After saying that, one of our program’s primary goals is to develop all our students to be better creative problem solvers. So, when ever possible I like to interject an element of creativity and push this fundamental goal.

Project 2

Project Description:
This project deals with the design of a typical informational rack brochure. Because of client budget restrictions you are limited to a two color solution.The use of spot color is important. Duo-tones and other two color effects are acceptable.
Procedure:
Create a rack brochure design for a company of your choice. You have total freedom to choose the company and control the design solution by your choice, so make good use of this freedom, you will never get this freedom in the real world. The brochure should communicate general information to the company clientele and prospective clients. It should convey a design style consistent with the company and its target market.The only restriction is the 2/2 spot color solution mentioned in the project description. You must generate all copy and graphics for your chosen client.The copy and graphics must be appropriate for the client, brochure and its intended audience. Start your design process in the normal manner with a well thought out concept statement, thumbnails, roughs and then finished comps.

Solutions:                                                                                                   Typically, the students react to the limited budget and produce simple, mediocre solutions with little thought to a creative solution. The last couple of years I have witnessed a marked change in this approach. Many of the students now view this limitation as a challenge and push their designs to a more fluid and creative combination of basic elements and come up with “portfolio quality” work, which is exactly what I want and expect them to do!

This year was the best yet! CONGRATULATIONS!

Here are some of their examples:

Alexandria Mundy

Ashley Drake

Austin Moore

Bryan Schwab

Cheyenne Austin

Darah King

Davis Varghese

Devon Baker

Haley Spradlin

Hannah Babb

Hayla Perrone

Johnny Salame

Kat Winstead

Kim Hoang

Lori Nguyen

Madisyn Bowen

Maisie Cross

Paige Summers

Sarah Pinc

Sonoma McCullough

Stacy Robertson

Terry Whitmore

Timba Le

Wylee Sanderson

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New Semester – Life After Retirement!

Tags

design education, graphic design, Painting, prepress

Yes, there really is life after retirement. Officially, I retired after the last Spring semester. Everyone asks me how I like retirement, my response is usually something like “it doesn’t feel a lot different.” It really doesn’t and that’s a good thing! I loved what I was doing before and I love what I am doing now. I am still teaching but now it is a reduced load. I am only teaching one class per semester. This semester it is Pre-Press. This reduced load gives me a little more time to work on my guitars and pursue my painting career. Over the summer I made slow but steady head way on both. I have two new guitars in the works and I picked up a new gallery, JRB Art at the Elms, in the Paseo district. JRB has actually sold a couple of big pieces. The latest will be hung in the new GE Building in OKC.

“Minions and Pink Ridges” being hung at the new GE Building

My one class, Pre-Press is going well. We just finished our first assignment and I have assigned a 2-color brochure project for the second. I have posted about this project in the past. Here is the link, which should help my students get started;

https://lhefnerucodesign.wordpress.com//?s=duo-tone&search=Go

At first this project might seem simple, so simple you might think it difficult to do anything creative. THAT IS THE CHALLENGE! Put on your thinking caps, go back to the basics and do something GREAT!

Pre-Press Production

Brochure Project

Project Description:
This project deals with the design of a typical
informational rack brochure. Because of client
budget restrictions you are limited to a two color
solution.The use of spot color is important. Duo-tones
and other two color effects are acceptable.

This project is designed to give the student a realistic limitation and experience in using spot color as opposed to cmyk. Even though the use of full color/cmyk has increased drastically in recent years the effective use of spot color is still an important tool in the modern designers tool box. Back in the day (my day) when a designer had to fend off dinosaurs on his way to deliver the finished camera ready art to the printer, the spot color brochure was king! Now, there has been a reversal and the use of spot color is rare and seems to give young designers a real problem, particularly with pre-press production. The first step is knowing the difference in process/cmyk color and spot color. So, do your homework and figure it out! Nothing will give you a bad rep with your client or the printer quicker than giving them what is supposed to be a two color job and it turns out to be CMYK or worse RGB. Make sur all colors are selected from appropriate spot color sources like Pantone solid coated or uncoated selection guides. Make sure all placed files are converted to spot color files like duo-tones or grayscale. There are several pit falls in preparing the pre-press files, so ask a lot of questions and double-check everything before sending the files to the printer.

When you approach the design of a new project with limitations there are always challenges to overcome. Just because there is a limited budget, it should not limit your creativity in the solution. In fact, it should increase your creativity so your concept can carry the visual solution. When working with a limited color palette, make sure your color choices are personal, appropriate and interesting. Don’t forget about the paper, it is even more important with limited color usage. It can add a tactile element that can help compensate the limitation. It can also add an additional color. TIP: when you have a limitation of any kind, go back to the basics, i.e. if your limitation is color, go back to your Design Foundation classes and emphasise other elements like line, value, texture etc. to help compensate. If you have a weakness, play to your strength!

Here are a few really old school examples to get you started. You can do a lot better than these, so get to work!

SNU FSG Brochure – Front

SNU FSG Brochure – Back

SNU FSG Brochure – Cover Spread

SNU FSG Brochure – Inside Spread

Deaconess Brochure – Front

Deaconess Brochure – Self-mail Back

Deaconess Brochure – Cover Spread

Deaconess Brochure – Inside Spread

HG Brochure – Front

HG Brochure – Back

HG Brochure – Cover Spread

HG Brochure – Inside Spread

For the SNU Brochure above a soft uncoated cover weight paper was chosen in a light tan color with a natural fleck texture to add warmth to the nostalgic photo. The photo was also printed using a fine mezzotint screen to add to the “old grainy quality” of the image and paper. The ink colors were a medium brown and a dark forest green.

For the Deaconess Brochure the ink color choices were medium blue and red printed on a standard white uncoated stock. Tints of the two colors were used to expand the color palette and enhance the illustrations. Many of the topics of the conference dealt with pregnancy and babies so the color selections and tints enhanced these topics.

Sometimes you can expand the limitations created by the lack of a budget by doing “hand work.” This only works when you need a small quantity or when you plan on dispensing the project in small increments over a long period of time. The HG Brochure is a prime example of this approach. This brochure was a promotional brochure that would be given to prospective clients, no mass mailing needed. There was absolutely no money for even a simple brochure and remember this was done well before “Desktop Publishing” so there was no computer or laser printer to print a small quantity. I had paper from a previous print job that went bad. The paper was pre-cut to a specific size and it was a medium gray color, making it hard to print any color other than black. So, with those limitations I decided to work bold with high contrast images. The images were created with a plain paper copier. I just placed the elements on the copier, put a white cloth over the element and the glass and copied them. This produced a high contrast B/W image that was easily visible on the gray paper. Since I didn’t need many of these brochures at any given time I decided to add pizzazz by hand coloring them. I used opaque drawing materials i.e. prisma colored pencils and prisma crayons to very loosely scribble color over the images. I used transparent marker and highlighters to add color to reversed headlines. Once I created a pattern that I was comfortable with my employees and I would spread out about 6 brochures at a time on our drawing tables and attack them in assemble line fashion. We would do 25-30 and when we would run out we would do more.

Just because it’s a small project with a small budget don’t settle for less than your best. There is an old saying that I usually quote when we are discussing portfolios “You’re only as good as your worst piece.” If you consider (and you should) that every piece you do is part of your portfolio then this really applies here. Good luck, knock my socks off!