I love my job.
Apr. 3rd, 2003 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gilanaPrinting is SO COOL. I spent most of today at a printing plant in Rhode Island doing a press check on a newpaper I designed for Gillette's benefits department to send out.
This was my first time seeing a web press -- that's where the paper is on a huge roll that goes through the printer and gets both sides printed at once, then gets cut and folded as it comes off the machine, rather than feeding big sheets of paper through, like a normal offset press.
It's always magic to me to see my design go from a picture on the computer to something flying through a huge machine at a hundred copies a minute. And it amazes me what goes into making it look just right. Fiddling with the amount of ink in each section so it matches throughout the piece, getting the different colors to stay in register even when the paper stretches, making sure ink doesn't end up where it's not supposed to when wet paper folds, finding the speck of dust that's leaving a tiny ink mark where one shouldn't be -- it's an archane art. There's always one old pressman around who's been doing it most of his life, and I always end up talking to him for hours, picking his brain about how it all works and how I can design better so jobs print as well as possible. They were really nice at this place about giving me the full tour and answering all my questions. A lot of terms I've heard around and options I've seen in programs suddenly made sense today; line screens and overprinting and dot gain all suddenly have real practical applications. Now I just hope the client is happy with the result!
This was my first time seeing a web press -- that's where the paper is on a huge roll that goes through the printer and gets both sides printed at once, then gets cut and folded as it comes off the machine, rather than feeding big sheets of paper through, like a normal offset press.
It's always magic to me to see my design go from a picture on the computer to something flying through a huge machine at a hundred copies a minute. And it amazes me what goes into making it look just right. Fiddling with the amount of ink in each section so it matches throughout the piece, getting the different colors to stay in register even when the paper stretches, making sure ink doesn't end up where it's not supposed to when wet paper folds, finding the speck of dust that's leaving a tiny ink mark where one shouldn't be -- it's an archane art. There's always one old pressman around who's been doing it most of his life, and I always end up talking to him for hours, picking his brain about how it all works and how I can design better so jobs print as well as possible. They were really nice at this place about giving me the full tour and answering all my questions. A lot of terms I've heard around and options I've seen in programs suddenly made sense today; line screens and overprinting and dot gain all suddenly have real practical applications. Now I just hope the client is happy with the result!
