If you drive down 14th Ave every day (like Brittany does), you might have noticed a new building pop up and open this summer—the Denver Police Crime Laboratory, at 14th and Cherokee. Zigzagging along its façade are organic window elements inspired by DNA helixes, as seen in the photo above.
When it comes to printing, clients ask us, “What printing process is best?” We tell them there are multiple factors to consider when printing any piece professionally.
Welcome to the second installment of the “things you probably didn’t learn in graphic design school” series. This post will cover what to look for when you go to the print house to check the quality of the piece. The press check is the last line of defense against a flawed print job that has to be trashed. Hopefully, if you paid attention to this post on the prepress process, your document was flawless as far as you knew. Do comment if there’s another topic you’d like to see up here. Once we officially launch, we should be providing new content more frequently on a range of design, illustration, typography, and print-related topics.
I’ve had the good luck to have had several mentors over the course of my career as a graphic designer, and one of the most important things I have learned since getting out of school is how to prepare a document for print. In the interest of hopefully helping some greener designers avoid some of the same mistakes I made—and the millions of other mistakes that are out there for the making—here is a comprehensive list to run through with any and every print document you send off. A lot of these seem like no-brainers, but you’d be surprised the asinine things you can pull off at the end of a project when all you want is to never see it again.