Digital Printing Tips

Digital printing is a great way to produce low-quantity, fast turnaround color printing. In the past, digital meant extremely low quality, but these days some of the digital presses can reach near offset quality if you know a few tricks. Here are just a few things to keep in mind when printing digitally.

Gamut

Gamut is the term used to describe the range of colors that a specific printing device can produce. If you’re coming from CMYK offset printing, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find out that digital presses can handle up to a 20% wider color gamut. What this generally means is that you can use redder reds, greener greens and bluer blues. This can be a real plus when designing your marketing materials that have vivid images that traditional printing simply cannot reproduce in the CMYK color space. Now that you understand color gamut, let’s move on to how you can put it to work…

Rich Blacks

If you’ve ever made the mistake of printing a large solid black area using only black ink, you no doubt found out what a rich black can do for you. In traditional offset printing you typically use a rich black formula of 60% cyan, 40% magenta, 40% yellow and 100% black – which gives you a total ink limit of 240%. This will give you a nice deep black in large solid areas. With digital printing, you don’t need quite as much ink coverage to attain a deep rich black – which has the added bonus of allowing you to use smaller reversed out type as well. While 100% black alone will give you a much nicer black area when printing digitally compared to offset printing, you can get a nice rich black using less ink coverage by using the formula of 40% cyan, 20% magenta, 20% yellow and 100% black.

Pantone Colors

While digital presses, much like CMYK inks, cannot reproduce Pantone colors with 100% accuracy, you can typically get a little closer when printing digitally due to the fact that color gamut is wider that when you use CMYK offset printing. Go ahead and specify Pantone colors, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Solids, Tints and Blends

There are a few areas where digital printing simply cannot stand up against traditional offset printing. Specifically, large solid areas. If you can’t avoid using large solids, try adding a slight “noise” or “texture” in the area in Photoshop. This helps avoid the banding found in solids when printing digitally. The technique also applies to gradients, which also suffer from banding when printing digitally. Tints (a percentage of a solid color) should not be less than 15% of the original color. Anything less than 15% will most likely begin to appear spotty, grainy, or simply not show up at all. Noise or slight texture to tints less than 40% will help greatly as well. Gradients and blends should be less than a 50% value change over 2 to 4 inches to attain the best results. In other words, if you’re trying to go from red to green in a gradient across a 12 inch wide area, you are not going to be happy with the results. But going from red to blue in a 3 inch area will probably look great, as would going from yellow to green in the same area. Another tip for blends or gradients where the beginning or end color is white is to NOT use the color white as the color. Instead, use 0% of the starting color. For example, to go from 100% Pantone 360 to white, set your gradient 1st stop to 100% Pantone 360 and the second stop to 0% Pantone 360 (rather than 100% white). This makes it easier for the software to come up with a smoother gradient because it thinks it only has one color to deal with, rather than two. In general, just try to avoid large solid areas of ink. Digital presses really shine when printing images, so take advantage of that!

Dot Gain and Font Sizes

With traditional offset printing you have to be concerned about dot gain. Dot gain is the process of the ink filling in the areas between the halftone dots as it dries on the paper. Digital printing beats the snot out of offset printing because there is no ink to gain, and there is no dot to fill in. What this means is that your images won’t get darker when printed, and your font sizes can be as small as 4 points on some digital presses and still be perfectly readable.

Final Notes

In some respects, digital printing is very much like offset printing as far as the pre-press area is concerned. Things you should do for setting up files apply to both methods and will always yield better results. Some of those things are:
  • Image files should be 300dpi – no more, no less
  • Scanned images should be scanned in RGB mode and converted to CMYK after (though some digital presses can actually print RGB images)
  • Images should be scaled in Photoshop to the size you wish them to be output, not placed in Adobe InDesign and scaled from there
  • Do NOT mess with color trapping. Let the printer and the RIP worry about it. If you do set specific trapping to your files, alert your printer to this fact so they can make sure that your carefully trapped file prints the way you intended it to.
Digital printing is a great way to produce low-quantity, fast turnaround color printing. In the past, digital meant extremely low quality, but these days some of the digital presses can reach near offset quality if you know a few tricks.

Best Tips for Branding Your Company

As a branding expert, companies often come to me asking, what can I do to increase my firm's name recognition? Of course, increasing name recognition is only one aspect of the branding puzzle, but an important one. It is particularly perplexing to a company well known in a certain market, (perhaps where the company originated), but disappointed at the lack of carry over in name recognition upon entering a new geographical area.

So, what can a company do to increase name recognition? Here are twenty-five (25) ways you can begin branding your company and increase the name recognition of your firm.

1. Hire a branding company to bring your image and message under a brand. Develop all collateral and image materials (web, stationery, logo, tagline, mission statement, cards, postcards, brochures, elevator pitch, newsletters, letters, project sheets, resumes, bios, firm description, etc.) to coincide with the brand and your message.

2. Develop a mission statement that shows your reason for being and the value you provide to your customers.

3. Develop a memorable tagline that expresses who you are and what you do.

4. Make a matrix of all those you'd like to reach in the next year and the potential influencer's on those people. Develop a timetable and calendar of outreach.

5. Regularly write and issue press releases to the media.

6. Regularly write and post press releases to your website.

7. Regularly write and post press releases directly onto the internet.

8. Regularly write articles and do all three of the above.

9. Regularly write and pitch feature story ideas to the media.

10. Diversify all marketing, PR and media to reach the markets where your clients are to be found (as opposed to marketing within your own service industry).

11. Participate (attend, speak, host, present, show) in at least two national and local industry conferences.

12. Create and issue an online or direct mail newsletter.

13. Get known for niche expertise or specific industry knowledge. (speak, write, present, teach).

14. Participate in professional internship programs.

15. Participate and sponsor local charitable efforts; get your name in the program the charitable cause distributes; get your name in the press surrounding the event.

16. Get to know all potential teaming partners in your new geographic area. Let them know your people, your areas of expertise and potential for cross referrals.

17. Develop collateral material with a regional bent; think what projects, services, people or elements might be important to this new market and capture this regional tone in all collateral material.

18. Develop tip sheets as to how your company is different than your competitors and why this makes a difference to teaming partners and to your end users-your potential clients. Include these differentiating tips as the basis for all your branding statements.

19. Develop a calendar of local and regional events in your locale and make your company visible in the areas most related to your company and your potential clients' interests.

20. Post your calendar of appearances and participation on your website.

21. Plan a media release before and after each event.

22. Hire an industry professional to conduct a survey on your behalf; post the results on your website. Publicize the results most important to your industry.

23. Update your website to be informational based so that search engines can find you, and clients can read in-depth material demonstrating your expertise.

24. Add informational website content a minimum of four times per month.

25. Establish your brand by regularly updating the financial value or potential value associated with your brand. Quantify results achieved and add these results to your brand value. Communicate through all methods, the value of your brand to those associated with it.

Branding your company is key to influencing a memorable response in the minds of your chosen audience. It is not only the name recognition of your firm, but also the perceived value of your organization. Capture these twenty-five essential branding elements and begin to cement a positive branded image for your firm.
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