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January 29, 2004
Get to know your medium
There is a great forum discussion going on over at DealMac today. Buckeye_Sean is going to be speaking to graduating graphic designers at a local college and asks the forum to come up with some essencial advice for new designers about prepress and printing. Some of the advice given by people can be applied to all mediums though: get to know your vendors and how your work will be output. This goes for print work as well as film/TV and Web work.
Here’s a copy of my post:
As a designer that works with a lot of different mediums, the thing that strikes me as being most important for young designers to know is that they need to learn as much as possible about the process of how their designs will be output and displayed. And they need to visit with printers or TV/film output vendors or web developers/admins to do that.Great designers in print, Web, or film/tv design will know the tricks of their medium inside and out. They can work with a printer to use a new printing trick to make a piece stand out. They can optimize a web site to load almost instantly, but still use large photographic elements. They can manipulate exact speed that type moves across a TV or film screen to keep it from flickering (or make it flicker, if that look is preferred).
I would stress to these young designers that one of the more difficult parts of getting to know how your work is output is understanding how color works in your medium. Each medium has its own aggrevating set of issues that have to be dealt with, but color is probably the most difficult to master across mediums. Dealing with RGB, CMYK, 216-color Web palettes, Spot/Process printing techniques, NTSC color constraints, digital video color compression techniques, log color for film projects, 8-bits-per-channel vs 10bpc vs 12bpc vs 14bpc vs 16bpc color for film/tv work, color in GIFs vs. JPEGs, metalic inks, hexachrome inks, paper brightness, coated vs offset vs uncoated vs newsprint vs whatever-crazy-thing-you-want-to-screenprint-on, worrying that people with black & white TVs or are colorblind will be able to still read your color text on a color background, and, finally, dealing with ColorSync, ICC profiles and how different devices display supposedly the same colors. It practically takes a miracle to get the color you want to actually show up in the end result of your design.
Finally, being surpised on the press is probably more expensive and time-consuming to fix than being surpised on the Web or TV. However, with the immediacy of the Web and TV, and how quickly these mediums can reach a wide audience, it is just as critical to avoid preventable mistakes (typos, misinformation, graphics issues, etc.).
Posted by paullheureux at January 29, 2004 11:33 AM
Comments
Hi, I think beside this technical works, advertising and play arround the most popular themes could also have double better results in design. this is only my idea . Anyway thanks and Good luck
Posted by: Omid.Z at January 29, 2004 12:14 PM