Designing reMIND – Part 4 – Book Production
on June 2, 2011 at 1:00 amBy Christopher Kosek
Want to make a designer or printer cringe? Use this phrase “I designed it in Photoshop”. Now what do I mean by that? I love photoshop. I use it everyday, but it’s not a page layout tool, and it’s not a good typesetting tool. It’s great for making art elements, but not design. Yes, it can do type, but it doesn’t work that well… or at all for multi-page book design. It’s the microwave oven of typography. A gourmet chef doesn’t prepare dishes with a microwave, nor should a designer use photoshop for layout and typography. It’s the wrong tool for the gig.
I use a program called Adobe InDesign. It’s specifically intended to be used for print production and layout. You can lay the book out in spreads, move pages around, make global typography settings (style sheets) and create press quality PDF’s. A book is one of the most complicated things you can ever design for print. So many elements have to work in sync and you have to be able to make changes on the fly. In PS if you are doing layout work and you have your type running across several pages. Any change you make you have to make manually to every file. Type color sizes, text flow. Lots of cut and paste, lots of selecting and time wasting. More importantly more ways to screw up. Not to mention that photoshop will take nice sharp type and turn it into soft fuzzy pixels. That’s another discussion that can be found via google.
In InDesign I can create style sheets and use baseline grids for nice and tight columns. Its basically a preference for the file where i can set every mundane detail of typesetting. Size, leading, tracking, color, tabs and about 10,000 other things and apply it to an entire document globally. I used this tool SO many times. I changed the typesize by a point or two, as well as the leading. I adjusted the color several times, i changed my paragraph column widths, even when Jason wanted to update the art..no problem. Everything stayed linked up and consistent across the board because i was using the right tools for the job in the right way. If you ever are thinking about doing a book, you must use this tool. At the end of the project when it was time to go to press, the program even told me if i had everything in CMYK and if they were press ready. It also was able to package up all my fonts, and images, make a nice and tidy package and make sure that we weren’t missing anything. This program (or its lowly “competitor”, Quark Xpress) is the only page layout program on the market today that will give you high enough quality and control and be accepted by a commercial printer. The printer will ask for your design files so they can do their pre-press. If you give them a ton of photoshop or illustrator files, thats extra work that they have to do, which means you are paying for it…and they charge a lot to do the work for you. Because Indesign has finicky forward and backwards compatibility its best to make sure the printer will accept the version you are using (no more than one or two back is standard).
When I started designing the book, I didn’t have jason’s final art yet. This wasn’t a big deal for me. I just designed my portion of the pages and inserted the art into the middle section at the very end of the process. I used some of the images from the weekly blog posts just as fill in. The one thing that really scared me was that Jason’s art and content wouldn’t be press quality. To his credit he was well prepared…he had been thinking about print since day one and had incorporated bleeds and gutters into his layouts. Even with that, it wasn’t until we put everything into layout, and printed and proofed that we saw the need to fix some of the layouts to accommodate the book. Jason had to go back in to several spreads and move things around to make it work. You just don’t know until you put it into layout.
Jason Brubaker - As simple as this may sound, it really is hard to tell how your pages will look until after you have printed it out with the bleeds cropped off. Even though I thought about it every step of the way, I was shocked to see several of my panels bumping up to the edge uncomfortably close. Perhaps in my second book I’ll give the pages more breathing room because of the experience of this first one. But these things are only obvious to someone who has done it before. Just another reason to get a good designer involved. Back to you Chris.
I had to write up a little desktop scanning tutorial for Jason as well to make sure his sketches and supplemental images were up to standard for what I knew we needed for the book. “High Resolution” is a relative term and just making it 300 dpi isn’t enough. When designing a book for press you are going to use large files. All of Jason’s art was in 300 dpi layered PSD’s to spec. All my images were Tiff’s and PSD’s. My final collect for output folder including cover was around 7 gigs! My final PDF to upload to the printer was a couple hundred megs! If you’re not filling up a couple of DVD’s to give to the printer, you’re probably doing it wrong.
Pre-Press
This is a bit of a misnomer. I didn’t do all the final pre press on this book. I didn’t create the traps or color separations. Thats not my gig. That’s something you want the printer to do, but there were some specific things we needed to coordinate with them before we send them a final print PDF. One big concern for Jason was color profiles. There would be no point in all this work, if the final product had color shifts. We had the printer send us the exact color profile and specs for bleeds and file preparation that the book would be printed with. I applied this to my design files, and frankly you don’t see much of any difference on screen. It’s all a behind the scenes detail that gave the PDF the correct information to tell the printer how to translate our colors to the printed page. We got our proofs back and everything looked great color wise. Design is details like that.
Jason Brubaker - I’ve been asked, “What exactly does a printer need? What color profiles do they use? If it hasn’t become clear yet, the only person who can answer that question is your printer. Each one has a unique system and profile. Don’t think that because Ka-Blam accepts .tiff files in RGB (and no color profile) that any old printer will do the same.
The cover was especially tricky. Because we were printing on paper and wrapping to book board as well as folio stamping on cloth, I had a very very tricky mechanical to build. I created all the elements separately to scale, but also sent this diagram along so that there would be no misunderstandings. Make it stupid simple and you’ll get what you want every time.
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Christopher Kosek is a Graphic Designer who’s been working on his own graphic novel for way too long. Originally hailing from Washington DC, went to school in Southern California and wound up in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his wife and puppy. He loves sports, comics, design, and stuff in general. He’s always looking to meet new people and get involved with new and fun projects so feel free to say hi!
See more of his work at www.christopherkosek.com
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Designing reMIND – Part 1 – Where do you Start?
Designing reMIND – Part 2 – Collaboration
Designing reMIND – Part 3 – The Guts
Designing reMIND – Part 4 – Book Production
Designing reMIND – Part 5 – Proofing
I just finished putting together the first collected volume of my webcomic. Making a printed comic book is easy. Making a 150 page book is hard. Doing it all yourself is a bloody nightmare (although it’s nice to have complete control).
At this point I’m a little nervous, because the books are all printed, but I won’t get to see them for a few days yet. The printer assures me that they look fantastic, but I figure he’s probably going to say that regardless, and with this book his eye won’t be nearly as critical as mine. I’m still kicking myself for not giving due consideration to the gutter space. The printer suggested adding about 6mm to prevent the artwork getting lost in the gutter, and while I was reluctant to have a slightly oversized book, it seemed a sensible compromise. One of the pitfalls of doing it all solo: you’re so focused on the details that you miss the bloody obvious.
Regardless of how the final product looks it’s been a rewarding experience, simply because I’ve learnt so much. I now have a much better understanding of how a printer wants/needs to print my particular book, and thus a better understanding of how to prep my files. Next time it should all (hopefully) be a lot faster and a lot easier.
I know everyone else has said it before, but these tutorials you post really are brilliant. Thanks for taking the time and effort to construct and post them. Alas, the only way to really discover how it all works is to experience it first hand, and as you say, it’s not until you actually see it on paper that you know whether or not everything was done right.
Hey Peter thanks for your kind words about the articles. I’m really glad you liked them and are finding them helpful. Thats what we’re all about with this project.
Really the only way you learn is through doing. As you said you learn so much when working with a proper printer. If it makes you feel any better, there is always that level of mystery when getting stuff back from print. You just never know, and even the most experienced people will get unexpected results or little things they wish they could have fixed. Also a lot of times we as designers and creators get fixated on small details that 99% of the world will never notice.