Adobe InDesign CS2 @work: Projects You Can Use on the Job

2017-07-07 02:10:07

Company collateral is the first step, and an extremely important one, in establishing your company's image or brand. A lot of thought needs to go into not only how you will be using your collateral on a daily basis, but whether it accurately reflects your company's image, product, or service. Elements to consider include the budget, format, style, color, paper choice, bindery processes, finishing processes, and mailing processes.

Distribution Choices

When selecting stock and ink for your collateral project, you must consider how the collateral will be used and what type of devices it will be fed through. This can significantly affect which inks your printer will advise. As an example, one of my stock choices was vellum because it runs through laser printers but smears with inkjet inks:

Will this collateral be used in conjunction with a laser printer or an inkjet, or both? Be sure you choose appropriate stock and ink for the output device you will be using.

Will you be duplexing (printing on both sides) with your paper stock? Some stock is finished (coated) on one side only.

Orientation Choices

Although most formatting choices aren't really choices but are standard, I've seen some very creative interpretations of those standards. Please be advised that if you deviate from those standards, it can have a significant financial impact on your mailing costs:

The format for letterhead is normally 8 1/2" x 11" (called portrait, or vertical, orientation).

Envelopes are usually 9 1/2" x 4 1/8" (landscape, or horizontal, orientation).

Business cards are typically 3 1/2" x 2" and are usually landscape; however, see my business card in Figure 4.1.

Figure 4.1. This is a vertically formatted business card. Although it maintains the accepted dimensions of a business card, the orientation is atypical.

Paper Choices

Your substrate or paper is also another critical decision: Coated or uncoated stock and various finishes need to be considered in conjunction with the ink or foil stamping choices. If you have environmental concerns, you might prefer to work with recycled paper. However, recycled paper does have some limitations, including a higher absorption of ink and raster images that don't look crisp. Vellum smears with inkjet printers and doesn't fold well. Note that folding with a paper's grain is important and heavier stock choices make this problematic.

Tip

For an excellent reference to paper and ink, see a new publication offered via AIGA called The SpecLogix Compendium of Paper & Printing. You can find it on AIGA's website at https://www.aiga.org/onlinestore/ibo/orders/.

Now, for your company logo. Does one already exist? If so, review the next few paragraphs. If not, use the next few paragraphs as a guide when creating one or working with a graphic designer.

File Format Choices

Let's consider the digital file format of the logo. Is it vector? Remember, a vector format (an example would be files from Adobe Illustrator) for your logo is ideal because it allows you to scale (shrink or enlarge) your logo while maintaining its quality. In this way, you can use your logo for any number of purposes in a variety of publications. If it does not exist as a vector file, you can see whether your prepress service provider or printer will convert your raster logo for you (as long as the nature of the image lends itself to a conversion).

Color Choices

How many colors are in the logo, and are they spot colors? Remember, the greater the number of colors, the higher the cost. Many logos are two color: black plus a spot (PANTONE) color. This is economical (99.9% of printed work uses black ink somewhere, typically in the text), and a second spot color avoids process color separation.

Caution

This color will appear repeatedly with your brand and should be selected with great care. Selecting an unusual color might affect future uses of the logo in additional marketing efforts, such as signage, website work, and so on.

Type Choices

When you create a logo for your company, you also might be making a decision about your company typeface(s). These will be the typefaces you use consistently for all marketing efforts and, again, they need to be considered carefully. A good resource to start with is Adobe's website, www.adobe.com. Take a look at the font catalog. Which type family or families have you chosen? Do they include all the typefaces you will want (that is, italic, bold, bold italic, and so on)? Additionally, if you are in an industry such as finance or science, there are special characters you will want to make sure your type family includes, such as fractions, ordinals, and characters for scientific notation.

After a typeface(s) has been chosen, you must consider your choice of font technology. Fonts is the digital or electronic term for type families and faces. Who will need to use these typefaces? Which type of computer will they be using to generate marketing material? In my opinion, the best choiceboth from a technology standpoint and a print production standpointis OpenType. The modern font standard is cross platform (it can be used on both PCs and Macs), is a single file structure (which simplifies its installation and transport), and supports extended character sets so special characters are easily accessed. I strongly recommend an investment in your company font selection. You will use these digital files repeatedly, and they are well worth the investment. Do not rely on free or "compatible" fonts because they are often problematic with your print provider's digital workflows and output devices.

Caution

Font licensing is a serious matter and I advocate with my own clients that a periodic inventory should be taken to determine whether their font library is in compliancemeaning they own the fonts being used.

Mailing Choices

Planning for mailing your collateral is also important. Do any of your choices increase postage by nonconformance to postal standards? Will you be taking advantage of bulk mailing discounts by utilizing a mailing service? If so, care and attention to your envelope template and the placement of addresses are very important. For more information on postal regulations, visit the U.S. Postal Service at www.usps.gov.

Production Choices

How will you be producing your collateral? Most likely the method will be offset lithography. This printing method utilizes metal printing plates and the chemistry of oily inks and water. The image is transferred from a printing plate to a rubber blanket and then from the blanket to the paper, hence the term offset. This is different from a direct impression from a plate to paper, which is called letterpress. Letterpress (one of the oldest methods of printing) actually uses a plate to strike the paper and is still used for printed pieces such as multipart invoices and ticketing.

After these decisions have been considered, arrived at, and preplanned with your print provider, it's time to put your files together and begin your first project.