Printing for MUGSS

POSTERS, T-SHIRTS, FLYERS

PURPOSE OF THIS DOCUMENT
This is a guide to printing publicity material – images, text, colours, file types, costs.

INTRODUCTION
Over the course of the year many items will require producing for publicity and other reasons. These are generally created by MUGSS and produced by commercial companies. Having an idea of the technology and jargon involved may be of help, and this guide is intended to highlight some of the main choices that need to be made. It contains information on the technology of the process, not the design.

POSTERS AND FLYERS
These are one of the biggest worries for the society, since they are very public, but they're tedious and expensive rather than difficult. The key thing is to plan in advance, get things ready in time and SHOP AROUND the many printers and options.

First, the printing options. Posters can be laser-printed or screen-printed. Laser-printing can be done by a business or individual with a colour laser printer. It uses a big laser printer and prints the prepared file straight out. Screen printing is done by a business. They create a number of plates, which are combined by a mechanical process to produce the final images.

Laser-printing generally costs more per unit, but has no set-up charge. Big numbers do attract a lower rate per unit. The cost to the printer is pretty much the same no matter how many you get. You can also go back and get some more if you need them. The quality of the printing depends on the paper used, but as a general rule the quality is inferior to screen printing, especially if large blocks of colour are used. Printing can be black-and-white, or multi-coloured. If you use black-and-white you can get a cheap colour effect by using coloured paper.

Screen-printing costs money to set up, since the plates must be prepared by the printer, but much much less per unit after that. This is more economic for a single big run. The cost tends to depend on the number of plates used, though it is slightly more complex than that. Paper is white but varies in finish (you could chose matt or gloss lamination at some printers for instance). The print quality of screen printing is professional and glossy and pleasing. In the past we've tended to go with screen-printed posters because they look professional and the size of runs we do makes them about as cheap. However, we've tended to limit the number of colours. On the other hand, just after Christmas (if you're organised) many printers do great deals on laser-printed flyers, because they're very quiet. Keep an eye out for these.

A NOTE ON COLOUR
When printing colour images there are a number of things that should be noted. In general printing is done in CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) and this is different from the colours that you see on your computer screen (Red, Green and Blue). As a result of this, some colours do not look very good when they printed – especially greens and oranges. If you can, it is useful to convert colours to CMYK before sending the file to the printer, as you will get a better impression of how the colours might appear in the finished product.

One further complication: some screen printers allow you can use spot colours instead of CMYK. This involves making up a simple palette of specific colours – say, this green, and that yellow – and using them exclusively. They can be shaded to white, and combined, but this is a little hit and miss and there's often no way to see how it will come out until you receive the finished product. You might get a cheaper print this way, or possibly just more control over the final colours. However, it's really only useful for colours outside of the normal CMYK range – glossy gold or silver, bright greens and oranges, for example. If you know what you are doing, spot colours can creates some really nice effects. Also, spot colour printing is really only to suited to vector file formats (see later).

PAPER SIZES
Paper comes in a range of standard sizes (in millimetres):

The paper sizes double with each step, so an A4 piece of paper is the same as two A5 pieces laid long end to long end, and an A3 is two A4s or four A5s, and an A2 is two A3s or four A4s or eight A5s:

They also all have the same ratio (1 to square root of two) for their short to long edges. So, if you have an A3 design, you could in theory just make it a quarter the size and hey presto (most printers will do this for you, saving you the trouble), you have an A5 design, or half it to make an A4 design. What size to use? We've tended to use A3 for posters in the past and A5 for flyers. Of course, you could use a design that fits twice width-wise on an A3 sheet, but you get the printer to cut length-wise to produce two long thin posters, but that's up to you. The point is that paper sizes are generally fixed as above, though some printers have other standard sizes such as 1/3 A4. You can get other shapes, but you'll have to ask the printer to cut them.

Depending on the printer, you may want to arrange for printing (say) a number of A2 sheets, on which you put (say) one A3 poster and four A5 flyers. You provide the composite image, the printer cuts it into constituent parts afterwards for you. The printer will charge you for cutting them down, but it may end up cheaper than buying them separately.

Printing on both sides is an issue for flyers. You can get a professional one-sided image and then laser-print black-and-white image on the other, but the glossy paper smudges ink easily and it's fiddly. Some printers will offer cheaper printing if you just want a screen-printed black-and-white reverse side.

FILE FORMATS
Printers tend to work with expensive vector applications. Examples of these are QuarkXPress, Adobe Pagemaker, Macromedia Freehand and Adobe Illustrator. If you can create your file with one of these packages, it is preferred (it scales better, can be more easily altered etc.). Other vector image programs should be able to export to either PDF or EPS and most printers should accept these formats. If you've added images to the document with one of these packages, remember to send the image with the main file to the printers.

If you can't work with one of the expensive packages, some printers will accept files in formats such as Microsoft Word. However, Word is not really suited to commercial printing and the document may come out slightly different from your original document.

For images, a TIFF format tends to be preferred, as no quality is lost by compressing the image as in formats such as JPEG.

IMAGES
The quality of any images is related to the resolution. For decent quality output, an absolute minimum of 300dpi (dots per inch) is required (a computer monitor is about 75 pixels per inch). Anything lower than this, and you start to see blocky edges. At full colour this makes a hefty file size – tens of megabytes – so you machine will have to be up to the job. You may find your graphics application supports a display and a printing resolution – the printing one is the important one. Also watch for the image size – printers usually want an image to have 3mm bleed (3mm bigger than it should be all the way around to allow for slight scaling or misalignment) if you use a non-white background.

As a monitor shows RGB colours, and you are likely to be printing in CMYK, you can't be sure exactly what your colours will look like – it'll depend on the printer's inks, the paper used, etc etc. You can try asking your printer. You might also want to try a graphics package – like Photoshop – that allows you to convert RGB to CMYK so you can look at it. This is especially useful if you're not going for 4-colour posters, and you need to see what the colours you've picked look like with a limited palette.

One quick mention for greyscale, which is a black-and-white format that you can convert your colour image into if you plan to do any black-and-white printing – onto coloured sheets, or from you lab printer, or using the free photocopying in the Union for example. Coloured A4 paper, a pair of scissors, and a black-and-white image is the cheapest way to make flyers for the ticket stalls.

You need to think about the text and any images you're getting from other sources – like the MUGSS logo – make sure it has a high enough resolution or is in a vector format. It would be a shame to do a lovely image and have blocky nasty text around it.

If you are using text or blocks of colour in a graphics file, it is worth using anti-aliasing (if your package supports it) as this smoothes the text or graphic into the background, making the edge less blocky.

A final note: if all this looks too daunting and scary, you can always buy the services of a graphics designer or indeed the printer to take a lot of this work of your hands. The more you do yourself, the cheaper it is, but not getting it done at all is a false economy.

T-SHIRTS
You have three options with T-Shirts that are similar to those with posters: two types of laser printing and screen.

Cheap laser printing requires white T-Shirts. You basically get the same as you would get if you laser-printed in colour or black-and-white on paper. The advantage is that you can get a full-colour T-Shirt. The disadvantage is that the laser printed image will fade in the wash quite quickly. If you're thinking of T-Shirts as marketing tools for show week, you may not care. It is basically done by printing onto specially paper that is then pressed on ironed onto the T-Shirt.

Expensive laser printing can be printed onto other colour of T-Shirt. It works the same as the cheap stuff but has enough ink so that the background colour is covered.

You can get kits for printing T-Shirts using your own printer and an iron, though for decent quality and for multiple T-Shirts, getting them done professionally will probably be better.

Screen printing is by spot colour, usually white or a primary on a T-Shirt of any colour. It works like paper screen printing – bigger set-up, smaller run cost. These last more years than people should be in MUGSS. If you only require text you may get it for cheaper. Providing images in black on white will probably be acceptable for most printers.

You may wish to save money or control the quality of the T-Shirts by providing your own. The other main cost is whether you print on front and back. Once again, explore all the options with your printer.

If you're doing an image, you may be tempted to take your colour picture and turn it into Greyscale, which looks fine for laser printing but doesn't work so well for screen printing. The shades of grey resolve largely to white or black. You need to do some work on the image to reduce it to lines and solid blocks of black or white.

References

CMYK and RGB

A discussion of converting RGB to CMYK for technical people.

U-Print (in the Barnes Wallis Building, formerly UMIST Print Shop)

FullColour.com in Congleton - cheap for non-urgent jobs

Laser printing prices – you should be able to get a discount as a student society. Remember to shop around! (Sam also has a duplex laser printer)

The GIMP

The free graphics package – does most things. Get Photoshop if you can!

Text by Al King, updated by Adam McNeeney