Print's not dead! On this episode, we talk about why color looks different on screen and on paper, how best to handle a document for print, tips on handling fonts, and the difference between Adobe Illustrator and Indesign.
If you're a developer, being able to order print can help you deepen existing client partnerships and land new projects. If you're new to print design, we've got some helpful hints on how to navigate the jargon-filled world of print.
Questions? Email us
Tweet us @lovelettersco or @mistertrost
For more episodes + show notes, visit
Resources:
Online print vendors: smartpress.com + stationeryhq.com
Local Philadelphia Printers: http://www.expresswayprinting.com/ + https://perfectcommunications.com/
Online InDesign classes: @paperandoats
Print's not dead! On this episode, we talk about why color looks different on screen and on paper, how best to handle a document for print, tips on handling fonts, and the difference between Adobe Illustrator and Indesign.
If you're a developer, being able to order print can help you deepen existing client partnerships and land new projects. If you're new to print design, we've got some helpful hints on how to navigate the jargon-filled world of print.
Questions? Email us
Tweet us @lovelettersco or @mistertrost
For more episodes + show notes, visit
Resources:
Online print vendors: smartpress.com + stationeryhq.com
Local Philadelphia Printers: http://www.expresswayprinting.com/ + https://perfectcommunications.com/
Online InDesign classes: @paperandoats
Hey, good morning and welcome to the pod. Today we're going to be doing a deep dive in to what? Stop. We're not diving into anything DEEP DIVE. If you're not going to take this seriously... Can we change the name of our podcast to Deep Dive? I would rather not. That would save a lot of time though. You editing out all the times I say deep dive. That's gotta take some time. Might as well just keep it in there and change the name. Let's pull up the thesaurus that comes with the computer, and find other words for dive. Oh look, literally anything but dive. You can jump, you can look, we can discuss. We're going to take a deep crater into a deep decline. We are going to spelunk the shit out of the crevasse. We are plummeting into... Print. The overlap is a show about the intersection of design and front end development. I'm Elle, a designer. And I'm Alex, a front end web developer. On the show we share our experience with each other about design and coding. We don't know everything but we share what we do know and laugh about what we don't. We sure do. Today on the pod Today on the pod. We're going to talk about printing. About what? Printing! Printing for what kind of purpose? Like printing my word document essay for school that I need to hand in? Uh, we can, I didn't prepare comments for that. My printer's jammed. So if you could help me out. PC load letter. Can you real quick tell everybody what your cats are named? So I have two cats and a dog and the dog is the light of my life. And these two cats, they're great cats and the one is called Low Toner and the other one is called Paper Jam. Love it. It is humiliating at the vet. I thought it was funny and I like to tell people my cats' names. But then at the vet when the nurse comes out and is like like Paper Jam? Paper Jam? And you're like, yeah. And they're like, no, we actually just need someone to work on the printer. Low Toner? It's humiliating. People just look at you like, wait, what? Yeah, everybody else has normal dog names like Lilly or Patches or whatever. Cats deserve those kinds of names in my opinion, I took a hard stance on that. Ridiculous cat names. They don't actually like respond to the names, do they? I mean, they don't respond to anything. Right. That's what I'm saying. You might as well name them a funny thing because it's not like you need to call them. Yeah, no, I wouldn't want to name a dog. Like if we were at a dog park, I wouldn't want to yell Low Toner! Right. Yeah, you say it too much. Yeah, it's not good. Anyway, we're going to be talking about designing for print today. Pretty excited. So you are definitely the expert in this field compared to me. So compared to both of us, Roger is the expert in this field. My husband works in printing and is color certified. Whatever that means. What does that mean? I honestly, I don't know. I got into a friendly disagreement. We call that a fight with the husband. No, no, no. I got into a friendly disagreement with a coworker about RGB and CMYK and spot colors. And Roger was like, tell him, tell him you're right. I'm G-7 certified, color certified. It was the lamest brag ever. Is that how you guys met? Met you in a bar and just like,"Hey G-7 certified. Yeah." And I was like,"Oh show me your certification."
:So, he's colored certified. He's kind of the professional. But you know your stuff
Elle:I would say I know my stuff. Have you ever ordered a job? Have you ever ordered a printed project?
:I have, but only flyers and things like that, but nothing that needed any kind of cutting or embossing or any kind of special ink or anything like that.
Elle:Well did you order it from an online printer or something?
:A local kind of print shop, like a minuteman press.
Elle:Ooh. Gotcha. Those are super clutch for last minute things.
:Right. So that's pretty much my experience with that.
Elle:That's cool. We're going to talk about print. We're going to talk about preparing your files for a printer and how that's different for print versus digital applications. I'm going to talk about some online printers that I really like. Shout out to Stationary HQ. We are not sponsored, but we're a fan apparently Not sponsored, but a big fan. I'm friends with them on Instagram. I thought you were going to end that sentence earlier. Just like"I'm friends with them." Oh, that's cool. And then it continued and it was sadder. So the biggest difference between preparing a file for print versus preparing a file for the web is the color profile that you use. So as you know, Alex, you use RGB, which is red, green, blue. In print. Printers use four colors of ink: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. So the K stands for black. That was confusing for a little while for me. It actually stands for the word key.
:Oh, right. That's what it was. I always assumed it was the k in black, but then when it was key black is that right? Yep, that's right. Now what's the key aspect of that?
Elle:I see what you did there. No, no. I mean like what do they mean by key? Like why is it called key black? I have no idea. Oh, cool. Today you've learned Absolutely nothing. The color that we see is light bouncing off of the thing that objects around us and then entering into our eyeballs and then it's translated by our brain. It's all part of what's called the visible color spectrum and the screens on our devices and printers that use ink can't replicate all of the colors that we can visibly see. So it's called a gamut. The gamut of colors that we can see is much bigger than the gamut of colors that we can see on screen. And the gamut of colors that we can replicate with a printer is even smaller. So there's a really interesting tool that Roger just showed me this morning. In a Mackintosh, if you open the color sync utility, it'll visually show you the gamut of colors that are covered by that color profile. I kind of remember seeing that, it's got like a cool rounded shape to it, right? The one that I saw looked sort of like a nineties virtual reality, 3D net. I don't know how else to describe it.
:I opened profiles. I'm looking in system. Oh this is different from what I imagined. Wow. I am seeing something incredible. I mean wow.
Elle:Guess, the picture. So it's got colors now, so that's pretty interesting. Yeah, it's fascinating. So you can see the difference between Adobe RGB and SRGB and CMYK. It just gets smaller, smaller, smaller. So there's a whole bit about science and light and wavelengths and bleh bleh bleh. I took a one color theory class and is RGB additive or is that the other one is CMYK at... There's additive and subtractive colors, right? Yes. So basically the general idea that I remember is that R G and B combine to be white, right?
:Right.
Elle:There's a whole lot of stuff about the way your brain translates color and it's a whole other show for scientists. But the RGB color gamut is made of three colors. Like Alex said red, green and blue. It's impossible to recreate exactly RGB colors in a CMYK space because RGB is made of light and CMYK is made of ink. So there are two totally different things and things that are printed, you can't just say, oh this is RGB. And the printer is like,"I know exactly how to replicate that with my ones and zeros. Beep Boop, boop". It doesn't work that way because...
Alex:Wait, you know programming? Who taught you coding?
Elle:I listened to this podcast called The Overlap.
Alex:Oh, nice.
Elle:So the RGB color gamut is made of three colors of light, red, green and blue. And CMYK is made of four ink colors, cyan, yellow, magenta, and black. So because printers don't print with light, that's not possible, they print with ink. This is a little bit of an oversimplification why the colors don't match one for one, but basically it's because light coming out of a screen is interpreted by our brain differently than light bouncing off of a piece of paper into our eyes. Does that make sense?
Alex:Yeah, absolutely. So just basically if you try to... if you like the green on your screen and you go to print it, it might not be that same green color that you liked.
Elle:Right. So because printers don't interpret that information the exact same way, you can get really close, you can get really close. Well, it's even different between screens, kind of like what you were talking about with the color profiles. What looks good on my phone might not be that same red on my screen either. Even from screen to screen, it's different. That's exactly right. So actually, on that note, I have a pretty new Mac book pro at work. And then I have an apple cinema display and apple doesn't make the cinema displays anymore. So I guess it's pretty old. The color between one and the other are different. And it doesn't matter for what I'm doing because I'm not doing very detailed color work. Like my husband who's G-7 color certified would do.
:I hope you drop that at parties.
Elle:I hope he doesn't listen to this episode.
Alex:This is James, he's a doctor. Oh, this is Roger. He's G-7 certified.[weird noise] I don't know why I did a horse impression, but sure.
Elle:So it's really difficult and almost impossible to perfectly recreate our RGB colors in a CMYK space. A printer doesn't print with light it prints with ink. So there's a whole lot of other things that go into it. Like the temperature, the humidity, the kind of ink, the paper that you're printing on, the coding on the paper that you print it on. There's a whole lot of stuff that goes into matching color. It's difficult to do. But if you're designing something from print, you should always start with CMYK. So that way you can(this a little bit of an oversimplification) but if you start with CMYK you can level set your expectations of what something's gonna look like when it comes out of a printer because the printer can't duplicate the bright bright bright vibrancies that you can see on a screen because it's created with light. Does that make any sense?
Alex:Yeah, absolutely. What do you do about photographs and things like that? I kind of get that starting with CMYK for drawing some vector graphics or some type, that makes sense to me. But as far as taking a jpeg out of my camera or a RAW file out of my camera and then putting it into CMYK, how does that work?
Elle:Well, it depends on what you're doing. If you were just printing a photo onto photo paper with your pro-sumer printer, I don't think it matters if you convert it to CMYK or not. Gotcha. We'll say I'm using it in a layout for a brochure or something. Yup. Then if you are printing it with a commercial printer, then yes it matters and you should convert it to CMYK.
Alex:Okay. But there's nothing I needed to do beyond that, just convert it over and the computer will make the decisions of what RGB color becomes CMYK, or...?
Elle:Yes. You can leave it up to the computer. You can also re-edit your photo to be a little more true to what you want that image to be. I personally don't do any of that because the things that I'm printing, the imagery that I'm printing, the color accuracy isn't as crucial as it would be if you were printing an Andreas Gursky photo. Does that make sense?
Alex:Except for the last part, who is Andreas Gursky?
Elle:He's a famous photographer.
Alex:Okay so, in other words, it doesn't need to be as true to the image that was taken.
Elle:Unless you're super picky about it, no I don't think it needs to. Unless you're doing like fine, fine art reproductions. There's a studio out in Exton called Brilliant that that's what they do. They print fine art catalogs and things like that. So yes, in that case it's very important about color reproduction.
Alex:Okay. So if I print a picture of someone, it's not going to come out green on their skin or anything. It's just going to be a slightly different...
Elle:Yeah, it's just not going to match perfect. Perfect. Like Pixel for Pixel, a thousand percent perfect. And a lot of times you can't even tell the difference.
Alex:Right. Absolutely.
Elle:Spot colors. You might have seen those in Illustrator or InDesign. It's a totally different idea behind spot colors and it's really only relevant if you are printing a large run print job with a traditional offset printer. I'm not going to get into it because there's a lot of information about tints and screens and matching ink that...
Alex:What is a spot color exactly? Is that the dots that I see on the label? Is that what that is?
Elle:Sorta, I literally just said spot colors, I'm not going to get into it.
Alex:But you said I might have seen it in illustrator.
Elle:It's a color space that you might've seen in Illustrator. If you look at your swatch palette and you open up a color book, like a pantone color book, it'll put it in as a spot color and not a CMYK breakdown. And that is relevant to when you're exporting files and what the printer, the person who is the printer, what that person interprets that information as. And then what that machine printer,(so I'm using the word printer to mean two different things occasionally). So the person and the machine will interpret that designation a spot color differently. If you're exporting a pdf from Illustrator or InDesign, you can choose the color mode that your pdf is in anyway. So it's irrelevant. I always print from pdf, I hardly ever send an InDesign print mechanical. I hardly ever send those out to printers.
Alex:You should use the settings that say print version?
Elle:I use a pdf X1A usually for high rez, high quality things but more on that later. So anyway, spot colors, you might see them in your color pallets. It's not really relevant here. You don't have to use them. I think that in this case, toggling between CMYK and RGB is enough. It's just highly technical and it's not...
Alex:I'm not going to need it, right?
Elle:I don't think so. And I don't think the people who listen to this are necessarily going to need it either. So like I said, colors on screen are made of light and colors on paper are made by ink blocking light. Printers print with ink, screens project light. So it's tough to match. There are people who can color correct a document or an image or whatever it is to match the colors on screen with the colors that come out of your printer. It's possible to get very close. Digital Printing has advanced pretty far. There are a lot of commercial printers that will print digitally and they can replicate RGB colors pretty well. It's not a one-to-one thing, but if you look at an RGB color, the one that I, that I specified a color, like if you type in 26 to 46, one 36 right into your, into your color spec window, um, it's pretty bright and it's in Adobe programs you'll get what's called an out of gamut warning. It's a little triangle with an exclamation point in it.
:I've seen the, yeah, and what it will, what that means is that color, like as you see it cannot be replicated by a printer.
Alex:Oh, buy a printer. I'm seeing it on the screen just fine. But the printer will be able to make that right. That's where, that's where the, like this color is made of light and other color is made of ink that that's, that's a color that just can't be made. It just physically can't be made by inc interesting by a CMY k bank. You'll get this out of gamut warning and it'll make a suggestion to you have a color that's close. I don't always think that it's that their suggestions are that good. Sometimes if you just leave the color as it is, it'll come out. It'll come out from the printer, like the printer driver will interpret that color and it'll get pretty close.
Elle:Okay, so the printer drivers doing a better job, you think then Photoshop is so finding you that nearest color? Sometimes it depends. Okay, so but what makes the good decision? Is the person doing it? Cause it's all about your personal opinion. Like if you visually look at something and you think it's close, like then that's what's for you. So it's not, it's not a science, it's an art. The machine that interprets this color that you have and then spits out a thing. Like it'll, it doesn't say like, oh I need to do this much red and this much blue in this much green because it doesn't have red, blue or green ink. It has Cyan, Magenta, yellow and blacking. There are high end digital printers that have red, green and blue ink to try and get really that, yeah, it's, I think it's called an indigo HP indigo press. Yeah. So like I said, machines don't make as good a decision as a person does. So it's important to look at what is happening at get a, get a physical proof or print it out on your printer and, and look at things. So the biggest difference between preparing files for digital applications versus print is bleed and safety areas. So, um, when you use, sent a job to a printer, did any of the image or the color touch the edge of the paper? Yeah, so I had to set like bleed, like I set up the document so that it would have a bleed, like maybe a quarter inch or something in, and I stretch the image, like pass the bleed line to make sure that when they cut it or, or just printed it, I guess that it would, uh, it wouldn't have the little white line around the outside. That's right. So when a document has color or image that touches the edge of the paper, it doesn't just magically print edge to edge when it, what they, excuse me, what they do is they'll print it on a bigger sheet and then cut it down. So the bleed area just makes sure that, like you said, you don't get that little white sliver of paper on the edge of your document. Screens don't have this screens don't come out of a printer. Screens don't go into a guillotine. Schools don't kick hut they can. So it's totally different and you don't, and you don't really need to accommodate for bleed with a screen. But, um, the con, the content safety area is something that you still need to consider in a digital application versus print. So not only do you need to consider like having color and ink that expands beyond the edge of the paper, you need to consider, like on the inside of your document how close stuff gets to the edge. So if that's true, it's different in web and it's, it's still true in web. Like you shouldn't put words like to the very edge of the skirt, the window, you know, it's tough to read and yeah, I think that's definitely part of it is just that it's, it looks bad and it makes it tough to read and everything. Like that's why you have padding on a website. Right. That's actually a really good analogy. Like I would consider like the safety area, like a padding. It's really important not to put stuff too to the edge of the paper because when you put a stack of pages on a g and t and the pages, because it's not one unit, they'll like move a little bit. Yeah, that makes sense. So the cut won't be in exactly the same spot on every single sheet because you're not cutting down a sheets one by one year, cutting them down in a stack. Right. So as, I mean they kind of like with food almost when you go to cut, like some bread or cheese cuts up the kind of shifts just because of the way it's cutting. Right, right. And that's, that's just physics. Right. Fun Fact. That's actually why you can buy like a pair of pants that are the same size as like another pair of pants that you have and they feel like they're different sizes is because that's the way they cut clothing too with a big like stamp kind of press. And so as they're cutting down the, the, the pair of pants that are cut out of the top piece of fabric is going to be a different size than the, than the bottom, even though the stamp is the same. You've been listening to the overlap, a fashion design and production podcasts, citizens, how factories work. And I'm Alex a factory supervisor, get back to work. So it's good to have at least an eighth inch bleed. A lot of places require a quarter inch. Depends on what you're doing. I've done some projects in the environmental graphic design space that needed a whole inch bleed on all four sides. So the, the bleed in the safety area. So the bleed, is it going to the edge because they're going to cut it there. Right. And then the safety area is for my content so that I don't put some texts off the edge, it's just the case. So, so the two different things, two totally different things but kind of but kind of related. I definitely see how they bleed is outside the size of your document. Safety area is inside. Got Ya. Yeah. So I just did, um, actually I just got a wedding book printed. We just put some of our wedding photos until like a photo album thing. And so for the cover I wanted like the picture to go the full size of the book and so we had some of the photo off the edge so like I knew it was going to get cut off, so I'm just like, that's the bleed, right? Yeah. That's called full bleed when it goes off all four edges. So you don't want like your face getting cut off. I mean maybe your face, but definitely not islands. No, that was intentional. Yeah, no, I made sure that my face was off it. Good job. Yep. As a developer or a freelance designer, you can offer printing services as part of your practice. Um, there's a lot of really great online printers that you can work with. It's a good value add for your clients if you're designing a website and you can also design their business cards and stationary for and then and then facilitate the printing for them, that's a huge value added to. It takes a lot of stress off them and you don't have to send them to another vendor. You don't have to be like, well I don't do that. Sorry. You know, and find someone else. It makes sense cause it's like when you're designing the layout of the site, like I can see that kind of transferring over a little bit into a business card maybe. Sure, sure. Yeah. If, if you're, if you're working on a website and maybe you're going to work on the whole brand and you can use some of the assets from the website to create other things for them, maybe it's a menu or a flyer or an invitation. It's really good to have that capacity in your practice. Absolutely. That makes sense. So my two favorite online printers are smart press.com and stationary HQ. Um, they're really easy to work with. They have all of their specifications like online. So if you need to know how to set up your job for print, like they'll tell you we need this big a bleed. Make your document this size, the trim area. Is this in their documentation or is that like you get to talk to somebody, you can talk to someone, but it's all documented online and it's really, really easy to use. So with the smart press, like it'll give you the print specs for a kind of job that you want based on what you're trying to order. And stationary HQ like just shows it to you. Are these like on the cheaper end of things or are these a little bit pricier? As far as predators go, they're really reasonably priced, but they're great quality. So that's the trade off. Yeah, they're not vista print. They're not acid flyers, which is really inexpensive. But what's the trade off there? What do you mean? Like what? Like why would I go for one of these over a vista print or an acid flyers? Just the quality is far greater, far greater. Say Sherry HQ has a nicer paper selection, especially for invitations and business cards. Smart press has like a lot of different papers, but depending on what I'm working on, I'll use one or the other. Like if it's, and sometimes I'll use both on the same project, like part of it will be printed by smart Preston. Part of it, it'll be printed by, but like the color reproduction from acid flyers isn't great. I've never actually used vista print, so I can't say, sorry, Mr print got a sponsor. So none of these places are sponsors at all. These are just like things that I've used in the past. So the acid fires? Yeah, we used for instruction cards for our sticker Biz side hustle and they don't, they didn't need that great color reproduction because it's basically a throwaway. Gotcha. That makes sense. But like the invitation that I'm working on for a nonprofit here in Philadelphia, I want a gold foil and I need the brand colors to match and I need the paper to be really high touch. So it just depends on what you need. Does that make sense? But smart Preston stationary HQ are, they're great. I've used them all the time. I've been super happy with them. I actually messed something up once for a stationary HQ and I sent an email like, why did this print wrong? And they were like, you submitted it that way. And I was like, okay, cool. Sorry. And they were like, all right, well here's like x percent off if you reorder these things. Oh that's cool. So like it was my fault. So they like, they were under no obligation to offer me any discount whatsoever and they were certainly not obligated to reprint it for me. Right. But um, yeah, they gave me like a little bit of a discount. Like, Hey, reorder this thing like you, that's good. Work with us a lot, blah blah blah. So a lot of these websites have really easy, easy to follow instructions for submitting your work. Um, I always submit using a pdf because it's vector and I, I just trust it. But they accept some raster formats. They, like I said, they have all of that listed out. I like to use pdf just cause I think that's, I've had the best luck with that. Right. And I use applications that easily export to pdf. Well, so, so just real quick for any developers, not sure about vector and raster. Um, basically like if, you know SVGs that's the vector. Those can be infinitely scaled up, but because they are just basically math under the hood, they're just basically numbers and people, people busy acre. Yup. And then photographs and anything like that. Uh, like gifts and jpegs, those are raster. And those can't be scaled up all that well. Yeah, you can scale them up, but they'll look at trash. It will be garbage. And you've probably seen things where like a picture. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's the pixelation in print. It's just not good. So I vectors kind of preferred. Yup. Um, especially when you're scaling things up for like environmental graphic design and things like that. Billboards or banners or billboards. That's the only form of advertising that I respect because it's the largest. Yup. So off track, but there's a series of two billboards on 95 and therefore bud light. And the first one says it has like the bud light can on one side and it says like Miller lite uses corn syrup. Okay. And then the second one says bud light doesn't, Oh God. Um, and I'm like, I don't, I'm already drinking alcohol. I'm not health conscious. Right. Like if the alcohol doesn't like, oh I won't drink that because corn syrup is, hi officer, I have no concept card set free. I'm five and be of all like even know why there's corn syrup in beer. Thank you. That housing's working nine all suspicious. But Bud light, Bud light. Yeah. I Dunno how many people who actually drink bud light and Coors light that are like, hmm. A shit give even half of a ship between them. And I'm like, you know what, I'm kind of a kind of sore here. I don't think I can be seen drinking a corn syrup beer. Right. And like if you're at a party and they had only have Miller lite and don't have bud light, are you going to be like, oh, I'm a bud drinker. No, they're all trash. Where you aware? Well, Eileen, drink the champagne of beers, so, oh, excuse me. Miller high life probably has corn syrup in it. Oh, no way. Oh Shit. Just ruined your favorite. I don't think champagne has corn syrup in it. Checkmate. What if it does? Uh, I dunno. It's weird. It's a weird thing to shame. Listening to the overlap. A, the champagne of podcasts, podcasts, a beer and liquor, uh, review podcast can be really be the champagne of podcasts. We have to be champagne of beers of podcast. Yes. Champagne of beers of Cadillacs of podcasts. Keep the metaphors. We're rolling. I don't even know what that would be, but it sounds hard and it is horrible. You're listening to it. If you're working with a printer in person, there's a printer, a local printer that I use that is in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Um, expressway printing. Kevin Parker. Love Him. All right, shout out to Kevin. Shout out to Kevin. It's really great to have a conversation with them beforehand to see, depending on what you're making, type of conversation and see what they need from you. It's really important to like just get on the same page right from the Gecko. It oftentimes it's just a 15 minute phone call. I do, I do, I do. Kevin is really great. And uh, expressway printing always does amazing work. So to circle back to the people, the humans make better decisions on machines do conversation, right? Those people are experts at matching color from screen to paper. Right? And those are the people that are going to do it way better than a computer camp and cars are going to come and take their jobs. But that's fine. Well, you don't drive a piece of paper. I mean, artificial intelligence, I saw, I saw x Mckenna. I know how it goes. Wait, how do you say, what I learned from that movie is that robots shouldn't be pretty. Yeah, that's, that's definitely a fatal flaw. We need to tell Japan, listen, Hey Japan, he kind of stop making these anime robots, the good ole boy that him to do when you're, especially when you're working with a local printer, like an in person printer is always outline your fonts. Gotcha. Okay. So by that you mean take it from being an actual like editable type and hit the create outlines button in Australia? Right, right. So then it'll become a shape. It'll become math. Even if they don't have my fun, they can still print it the same way that I'm seeing it. Right. That's exactly right. Yep. So PDFs are sometimes weird about embedding certain fonts and if your print, if your printer is working from your illustrator file or from an eps or from your InDesign file, they, it's better to just create outlines because they probably don't have the font that you used on hand to replace it, and it's just gonna piss them off to be perfectly honest. Also, sometimes I feel like I can't name the font or a font that does this, but I feel like there's different versions of fonts. So even if like I have Helvetica, let's say it's not the same cut of Helvetica and somebody else has, so that's not my imagination. Okay. Yeah, so that definitely makes sense. That's absolutely true. And we've actually been having that problem with Ariel. So Ariel for a PC is different than an aerial for a Mac. Oh really? Yeah, and we use a reuse an application at work that where we keep all of our documents when we share them out on the web and we were working on an investment research piece that was basically just like, here's what's going on in the economy and the pdf displayed in the pdf viewer on the, on the webpage. It interpreted the font in a Janky way and no one knows why. Like it looks fine if you open the pdf in a browser, but like this application or this software that we're using to store and distribute our documents interpreted that pdf badly. Yeah, I learned way more about Microsoft word that day. Then I really cared too. Can anyone ever wants to Ariel the champagne of funds? Paint Beers of Cadillacs, a fox. But yeah, like different cuts of aerial look different are interpreted differently by different machines. That makes sense. So yeah, if I want it to be the way that I see it, I need to make it into an outline so that my printer's Ariel doesn't screw it up. So you'll notice that I haven't said anything about Photoshop. No, you have not. Because you shouldn't be designing for print and Photoshop. Hotcake what? Why? Never. Never. Ever. Never, ever, ever, ever. Now I believe you because you've said that so many times. So I know this little old school and the type handling tools in Photoshop have gotten a lot better and a little bit more nuanced and robust, but they have, they cannot compete with the type setting tools in illustrator and design. So, and it's also kind of not what it's designed for, right? It's absolutely not what it's designed to. Your shop is really just for photography and image manipulation and stuff like that. Right. It's for like my brushing and touching at pictures and making me look skinny. Yup. Yup. No one's ever seen Elle in public for real. Oh No. Oh my coworker. My coworker, my coworker Andrew Chorus, if you're listening, I'm still mad about this. I walked downstairs to talk to someone who needed something from me and he goes, there's an Elle-ephant in the room. Ooh, can I carry to him? Hand on hip, hand on hip. And I said, we work in an open office. Excuse me, Andrew, did you just call me fat? And he was like, no, kind of. I was like, I know that I've put on a few pounds, but that elephant comment is just unnecessary. See I thought he was talking about your nose but okay, that makes sense. I was eating a banana at the time so you really shouldn't use Photoshop to design anything for print. Even like small stuff just because Photoshop also has better rendering engines for raster types, so like the smoothing is a little less bad than it used to be, but it's still not as good as illustrator and in design. So never designed for print and Photoshop. Gotcha. If you're putting words on it, do it in illustrator and design, which brings me to illustrate our verse in design. Are you familiar with either or? I've used both. I actually, I used in design to do that wedding album that I just got printed out by sending off to blurb.com have you heard of them? Look really nice books. Yeah, so we got a pretty nice book from them. They have like a whole InDesign plugin that was really easy to use because just like it set up the bleed and everything for me, so I was able to just kind of work within that. That was really handy. So so I didn't have like guests around like, oh, am I doing this right? I heard that blurb has like really good templates or plugins or whatever, but I had never used them. Yeah, it was pretty good. So I used in designed for that and I use illustrator for just about everything else. I think XD is starting to replace illustrator for me for a lot of like my web layout kind of stuff. Like I used to use illustrator for that, but XD is designed specifically for those kinds of layout things that has so many great tools that can make that a lot faster. Yeah, it has a lot of really good prototyping tools. Yeah, exactly. So illustrator only very recently introduced art boards in the, in the olden times and the before now times you just made a document that was really big and then you do the, yeah. Used the tile setting on your printer to make different a multi page pdf. Do you remember that? Vaguely. Yeah. This was, this was early in my career. I'm old, it turns out. So you would have just one giant art board with like all the different pages that you needed on it. Yeah, I don't know if I remember that. Yeah, it was really difficult. The airports are nice. No, but yes, nowadays you can make a multipage document and export a multi page pdf from illustrator. However, this is not really what illustrator was designed for. Illustrator was designed for illustrations and types in like small type setting, like type manipulation and things like that. So like vector art and things like that, right? Yup. So if you're a setting type, like a lot of type, like paragraphs of type, I would say a good guideline would be like if you're, if you have more than five words on a page, use InDesign or, or if you want to like make a book. Right? Or if you're using images. Yeah. Like I don't have any type in that. It's just all pure pictures. But you mean you didn't put like I will love you forever to the moon and back in your book I put to the kitchen and back. Oh take, yeah, hot take. Got It. Got It. Nailed it. Crushed because that's about the only distance my love goes. Ah, okay. So if you're setting a lot of type illustrator isn't great at that in design has much more robust, a nuanced tools for setting large amounts of type, like paragraph settings and tabs and space before and after and bullets and numbering and paragraph styles and things like that. Like illustrator has some of that, but it's so much better and easier to use an in design. There is a gal that I follow on Instagram at paper and oats also, not, not at all like a sponsor or anything, but she does a course called the InDesign field guide and it's basically for people who want to learn how to use InDesign or if they want to switch from illustrator to InDesign. I haven't taken this particular course, I've taken other of her courses, but she's really great, really smart and everything is presented in a really accessible way. So if you don't know how to use InDesign, highly recommend might need to grab that just to get a little bit better. Cause it was, it was, it was nice using it, like it's enjoyable and it's similar enough to illustrator once you kind of understand the way that pictures work in it. You know what I mean? Like he'd draw the content box and then you drop the picture in or whatever. Yeah. It's a familiar interface. Yeah, it was. It was, it was nice to work with. Yeah. I, I love it. Um, I had to learn in design just through trial by fire. Um, when I did my internship in college, they didn't have Clark and that was what I learned in college. You mentioned Quora, Quark Express. Quark is basically, quark is basically Adobe in design but made by somebody else. And it was, it was one of the first, I want to say I'm a little out of, I didn't, I didn't research this, but it's, it's been around forever. It is, it's still around. It's still around. People still use it. People would swear by it. I remember back in like 2006 or seven when I was taking like a class on this we learned in Cork and people were like, it's better. It's not a decade later. Well yeah, and back then it was Adobe pagemaker this is pre InDesign and then they turned to page maker into InDesign. And in design since then has gotten so much more robust. Like quark was really great because like it had controls like down to the very like minute type spacing things. And it was very accurate. But I would say that in design is just as accurate, just as robust and ways year to use. Yeah, I kind of see that happening in the next 10 years or so with XD and m and not sketch. Sketch. Thank you. Yeah, I see that happening in the next five, 10 years with XD and sketch. I don't know. I don't trust the Adobe. Adobe has been making some really bad choices and I'm not going to say oh so they just, oh, the cloud stuff. Well they've changed some tools and they've changed some settings and there are a lot of things that I've used for years that are now extremely buggy and very frustrating. Weird. Well I just see their, their move to make it free because they can because they have the market share and they had the other products to make them money. Right. But like my thing is is like I don't think XD will ever replace sketch be in terms of quality because I don't think Adobe has, uh, professionals in mind. I think they're making products for consumers now. I think they're true. They're sort of gearing towards prosumers. Interesting. Alright. And then what makes me think this, and I am so sorry, Adobe and advance. Please don't act kindly. Don't ask me. There's a real fear of them. Then tagging us on Twitter. I like, like when you launch illustrator, it's like, here's a bunch of corny templates. We have a relationship with Mu. Lay out your resume, and I'm like, that's not, I don't need that. Right? Like I don't need that. But I think that's like for the beginner, if they're trying to get everyone in, I don't, you can just kind of turn that off and just kind of skip past it. But the way that they're gearing their product towards beginners and amateurs and consumers, not that they need to be exclusive to professionals, but I think that the experience for our professional is suffering by the inclusion of all these, all these other groups. I can see that for sure. Sketch, I don't think is that because they've always been for professionals and I don't see XD taking over for sketch because I don't think it will be come the thing for professionals, the way in design dead for Clark. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, that makes sense. I'm sorry Adobe, you're just making a lot of bad choices lately. Hey, Adobe admin, kindly don't ask me please happy someone at me. Someone tweet me, please don't know what I'm saying. So whatever it is at me. So there was one thing that changed in Photoshop that I'm still having trouble with is the way that the, the shift key modifies when you're scaling. Yeah, turn it off. But I'm so mad that they just did that and then they throw a pop up like, hey, you're using the shift key different now like fuck you, I've been doing this for 15 years. I mean it still throws me, oh it makes me crazy. But in retrospect it does make sense because keeping it to scale, it should be the default should it? Yeah. What if I want my face to be a little fatter? Then you hold the shift key. I mean like you know, nine times out of 10 I'm holding the shift key to keep it to scale. Right. I just like the feeling of it. You can turn it off. That might be, I wonder if that's coming from a place of like converting these applications to be mobile friendly, like iPad friendly cause there is no shift. You can't hold the shift key to scale when you're doing things with your hands as possible. I don't know. It makes sense. So speaking of sketch, I've never actually used sketch to create something for print but I do know that their export to pdf function is not great. Yeah they're not really designed for that. People use it a lot or as an illustrator, a substitute. She was kind of funny. I'm sure you could make a business card or like some other kind of layout in sketch and have it successfully printed but they would not do that. I personally wouldn't. And I think that their exports, a pdf function is so limited that you can't control a lot of it. There's a lot of stuff you can do in InDesign and illustrator that you can make a pdf that's correct for what you need to do and I don't think sketch has that. I wouldn't use it. I would love to hear if you did use it and if you had any success there. But from lack of experience, I honestly don't know. Yeah, interesting. It's not the tool for the job. You could put a screw into a wall with a hammer. It's just not, not the right tool for the top right, which is how I feel about using Photoshop for print. It's just not the right tool for the job. That's kind of why they have that whole suite of apps. They'll have a slightly different thing to do and they play well together, right? Oh yeah. No. Opening up a photo in Photoshop from InDesign was, is easiest, right clicking on it. So it wasn't bad at all. Yeah, I really liked that feature. You can actually place InDesign files in other InDesign files that, but um, so I'm working on an invitation for this nonprofit and I do what's called like a digital mock up where I'll show the invitation with the envelope and I say that it's this big and it's going to be printed on this paper and it's going to cost this much like I get pricing. And all that in my design documents, when I create that digital mock up in InDesign, I link to the actual design file of the invitation so that I can just edit it right from there. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, it's super great. And when I'm working with like different parts of one invitation but just laying out one document, I don't need to like export to pdf and then place the pdf or export the jpeg and like it's just really seamless. I don't know if it's always been that way, but the connection to illustrator is also a lot better than it used to be too. That's cool. So you can just copy and paste from illustrator. Oh yeah. Yeah. Um, I think I did that with the EA logo that you, that you made for us. So yeah, that was pretty nice. But just a couple of rough and you pictures. Oh, I can't wait to see it. The are you guys getting copies for your parents and stuff too? Yup. Yeah. We ordered one as a proof and they came back great. And so we ordered two more blocks. Yeah. Made a book. Um, is is the InDesign file a file how they do like, uh, like the geometry book where kids are like holding the book and then they are on the cover of the book and then inside, you know, like the house of mirrors kind of photos were just cut this, it didn't work out to cut. It kind of knows a joke cut at Todd Todd. Cut that attempt at a joke. Yeah, you're using illustrator. It's great for print because it's factor, always create outlines. But if you're laying out something that has more than five words on it, switched to InDesign, InDesign has a lot of really great features for that. All right. And in design is great for interactive PDFs, like a digital pdf and for[inaudible] pdf, is there something you can do like prototypes that I don't know, but when I say interact with an interactive pdf, it has links. Like you can link out to a video or you can do a contents page and like linked like a form or something to forms. You can link, you can click on something in an interactive pdf and it'll take you to that page. Hmm. Oh, okay. So you can make a table of contents or like an asterisk that links you to, right. Like it's, it's like an when you're creating an Ebook, right, that fell flat, but there's just a lot of really great things that you can do with InDesign and PDFs that you can't do with illustrator or Photoshop. So if you're designing for print, highly recommend Adobe end design. Gotcha. Um, so as a developer I can kind of see myself needing to maybe get some business cards for either myself or some clients. Um, you would kind of recommend that I opened up illustrator or InDesign, right. Set the art board or whatever to, was it three and a half? Three and a half by two, I believe. Yeah. Three and a half by two. Yeah. And then just kind of building it out in there, sitting my colors to CMY k and then sending it off to a printer or getting in touch with the printer first, right? Yup, Yup. And kind of going from there. And all right. Cool. That sounds great. I feel like I know a lot more about the print process and everything that that's, that's really cool. Cool. Yeah, I feel a lot more confident because I've, I've always kind of wanted to get some business cards made just to have Alex Trost podcaster the champagne of podcasters. Yeah. I was thinking, uh, maybe size of a billboard business card just to get attention. Yeah. Well that's the only ads that people actually take seriously. So it's the only ones, it, it's the truest form of expression. I feel like highway billboards, three billboards outside of new haven, Connecticut. Yeah. That, that tell me about political or religious, uh, opinions at the billboard owner has that, those are my favorite. That's great. Okay. Um, yeah, so this was an awesome episode. Thank you so much for teaching me about all that print stuff. That's awesome. You Bet. Um, I have a question for you actually from my 100 questions from the school of life. Shout out to 100 questions. The school of life in no way sponsors this podcast. That's cool. life.com forward slash overlap will be a four o four because they are not sponsoring. So this just a box of questions related to different aspects of your career. And this question is if my childhood self could see what work I am doing now, he or she might think, what would your childhood self think of you? Alex? Oh boy. So what age are we thinking here? Like teenager, maybe good teenager. I was thinking like seven oh seven I think whatever. Any seven year old who sees their adult self like sitting down at a computer all day, we'll just be depressed. It's like, why don't you go outside more? What do you mean there's no recess? Um, my seven year old self. I don't know. I think they might be a little disappointed or just a little like bored with my job. That you're not a fireman or a cop? Probably. Yeah. Why aren't you a doctor? Um, I think the older you go, the uh, I don't want to say, I think the more satisfied that person will be with like how things panned out, you know what I mean? Um, I know that when I was like, I'm gonna say like 13 or 14, I specifically did not think that I was smart enough to do programming. I kind of had that whole like, oh, you need to be really good at math. You need to really know like calculus to be able to program. And so kind of doing that now, I think that'd be kind of cool for that person to see like, oh, it's not actually that hard. Like I don't think like I didn't get smarter, it just that if it wasn't a thing that needs a lot of math, so it kind of worked out. That's awesome. What about you? I think your childhood self would be really impressed with you actually. Uh, no. I mean, what do you, what would your childhood self be or feel about you? No, because like I never really had career aspirations or dreams or whatever. Like I just never imagined what being a grownup would actually be like. I think that my career and my job right now is sort of a sword with two edges. Like, yes, I'm a creative, like, yes, I'm a designer, but I work in finance. Like that I don't think is appealing to a teenager. You know what I mean? Like it sounded like finance help boring, you know? But yeah, he worked for an investment firm. What even is that? Right. So it's so I don't think the investment aspect of it, like the finance aspect of it would be very impressive to my young self. Right. But, but if you are making less money and working for like a skateboard company or something, they'd be like, well cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Kids are idiots because they're so stupid. Shut up to not liking kids. Oh, okay. But um, I think, I think that early teens l Troast would probably be like, oh, okay, cool. You turned out all right. She's not like, wait, you're still rolling. I mean, I didn't want to bring we, you're not on drugs or in jail. Good job. You beat the odds. Damn Nana. A few people owe me some money. Give teenage stuff goes and collects what's with all the gray hair trust. Have you showered lately anyway? Well, thanks for tuning in guys. Listen to all that, and I can say it's great because it was mostly you. If it was me, I can't say, wow, I did a great job there or a pat on the back for that. Wow, that was pretty fantastic. You're welcome. Listeners. You're welcome. Champagne of podcasting right there, the champagne of podcasts. All right, so thank you so much for listening. Send us your questions. Send us your comments. Tell me about how I'm wrong about the printers, not printing with light. Really Hope. I really hope you're wrong about all the colors you mentioned. RGB is not red, green, blue, but the current view entirely. That'd be fantastic. You can connect with me on Twitter. I'm@lovelettersco And I'm@mistertrost. All of our episodes and our show notes are on overlap podcast.com and big thanks to Aa Alto on the free music archive for the theme song for a show. Go ahead and subscribe, smash that subscribe button, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We appreciate it. Um, and you get more of this sweet, sweet content every week, every two weeks, if you like the show me Nice. I found out that Stitcher, I, she doesn't do reviews. Uh, some other podcatchers do. Yeah. So if you have a pod cast or catcher that, uh, oh, so it's, it's dream catcher podcaster is headed. I think that's what it is. Um, if you have a pod catcher that does reviews, we'd love it. If you don't just subscribe, that's fine. Yeah. Subscribe. Download. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much for tuning in. We'll see you all in two weeks, two weeks, every other week.