Let's Look at Package Big Things from A Small Point
When we choose a product, most of the first thing we see is the packaging. For ordinary consumers, they will pay attention to whether the packaging is beautiful, and then pay further attention to some information on the packaging. However, for the printing practitioners, we will consider the packaging materials and production process, and even intentionally or unintentionally look for some printing defects inside, such as whether the overprinter is accurate, and how the small words and lines deal with the edges of strokes... Because packaging is generally a mass printing, printing process will inevitably appear unsatisfactory place, so how to improve printing quality as far as possible? It is the so-called details of the real chapter, whether digital printing or traditional printing, the treatment of small elements are crucial. Here are a few lessons about how text and lines can be better reproduced in print.
1) Use vectorized text and lines whenever possible
For books, newspapers, periodicals and picture albums, the final document is naturally a vector document because the designer used founder books or InDesign and other typesetting software at the beginning of the design. For packing, however, many designers will be based on personal habits use Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, Photoshop (hereinafter referred to as the "AI, CDr, PS) software, if you choose to use PS into Tiff format for the final documents, due to its belong to the bitmap file, do not have vector properties, the printing quality is not very ideal, so vector and bitmap file is how to affect the printing quality?
If the package is designed with PS and has a large number of small words and lines, the final output can be EPS file, and the vector properties can also be retained. But the disadvantage is the large amount of file data, in the subsequent operation will drag down the computer running speed.
2) The choice of colorific collocation
The designer has an unwritten rule for the color allocation of small elements in packaging design, which is the maximum three colors theory. In other words, the fewer colors, the better. In multicolor overprinter, large area of elements are not obvious. For small text and lines, even the most advanced machines may overprint due to improper operation and machine error, which is called ghosting. Packaging is a lot of small text, all kinds of explanatory text, trademarks, bar code, etc., all need to consider the color configuration caused by the printing overprinter.
A friend might ask, when configuring colors for an element, would it look good to use all three colors? This problem needs him stylist to solve, simple tonal and ok and tie-in gives beautiful picture likewise. The creativity of designers is endless, although the printing is a four-color mode, but three colors or two colors can be mixed out of the color is very rich.
In order to avoid overprinter errors, many packaging at the beginning of the planning to consider the use of spot color, spot color is the best solution to avoid overprinter, not only can be printed out of the four colors can not achieve the color, but also to avoid the appearance of the dot, more important is to avoid overprinter. This is why spot colors are used extensively in toothpaste boxes, medicine boxes, flexible packaging, etc.
3) The treatment of black text and lines
a) Black text in white background
b) Black text in colored background
2019 02/26