PRINT PRODUCTION FOR DESIGNERS

Karla Torres- Dec.19th

I think that the quality of the print came out better than I expected it to be. I’ve printed with lulus before and they were great and all but the only thing that went wrong was that not all the pages bleed. We were lucky that the print came great it actually looked like a professional book. One thing that I thought made the book great was that the front and back cover type had almost this texture feel when you touched it. It made the book pop out even more. The colors used in the book also made the book pop out even more. Overall I was really happy with the outcome and quality of the printing. It is also nice to know that there are these cheap websites that print out books for you. I mean if you go to any other place they would charge a lot of money and the quality and overall printing wouldn’t even be great.

My group and I came up with the concept pretty quick. I believe that the biggest issue was just time. We wanted to do so much more for the book that we just couldn’t do because of everyone’s crazy schedule. It sucks that we couldn’t go with our original concept that was to illustrate everything ourselves to make it feel more personal. I thought that our book was pretty original with a twist because it wasn’t your everyday Christmas Carol outlook. I think that the watercolor textures and the illustrated images really tied in well.

Even though I was happy with the results I got from the printing, there were still some mistakes we had to fix. One of them was that we had some images that were low-resolution images. Another thing I was considering fixing was the copy typeface because it looked fine in the files but after we printed it our it didn’t really go with our outlook of everything.

Huanying_xu for DEC 19

We started this project by brain storm ideas, I was so impress by a video that my other professor show me few days before. It’s a documentary about how the whole MTA subway system was design. so I though if we can do the same thing it would be amazing and very fun. luckily both of my team mate likes the idea that i had, then we started to discussion about what to do next. We decide each of us is going to design our own logo then take a vote on it. finally we all agree to use my design idea for this project. Then we spread our work to each of us going to do 6 layout and the content will be our favourite train line.

It was very smooth through the whole process, we share our though, we share our design, we give opinion on each others work, an we respected the idea each of us had. until last week we presented in class, we found out there are a lot to improve then we get together again to make it better. From the beginning we wasn’t sure where to print our book, we called Remson, we check the Blur website. We calculate how much time we have before final therefore Blur wasn’t our option because we afraid it’s going to be shipping delay since it’s gift buying holiday time. So we decide to go to .

After I view the finish book, I am totally satisfy by the quality, the paper, the color and the trimming. Beside there are little off center of the binder so there are colors went off to an other page, but it’s just a little not quite. But there are always things could be improve, the design, the layout, the color, over all i am pretty happy with it. Last is to thanks to my group mate, we enjoy the project so much and we do communicate enough to improve everything that we need. I enjoy this class through out the semester, it give me to chance to experience making some thing real than just doing design in the computer, i really wish we can have Print production II , i will definitely sigh up for it. Last is to thanks Professor Matthew for being such great teacher, really took time to explain things well. Happy holiday for everyone !

Amanda Protain for December 19

For my group’s final project, I am actually happy with the quality of our work. It looks exactly like what we had on screen, which is amazing. It has just the right amount of pages, too.

During our group discussion, it was really hard picking a topic. Within the first 2-weeks, one person was always missing so our thoughts were not so clear and precise. Eventually we got together and decided to do a book about food. Since food was such a vague topic, it gave us an opportunity to learn about each person’s cultural background. This also led us to cultural foods in our own neighborhoods, because we are familiar with our community.

Everyone contributed the same amount of work, because we all conducted our own research, imagery and writing style. We brought our work to class to compare and contrast, choosing what works and does not work. The challenging part about the assignment was when we didn’t receive any guidelines, so picking a topic took us a while. Also, our layout was super hard. We referred to magazines, advertisements and cook books to for inspiration.

The finished book looks amazing. If we were to go back and change anything, it would be to make our files bleed and make the cover slightly larger. I am actually impressed to see our own personal ISBN number added as well.

Justin for December 19

I first want to say that I’m happy for having such good group members, and I’ll miss working with them. The book we worked on was an MTA handbook which showed different places to go in the city with the assistance of the subway system. We settled on what we would work on for the project on the first day we were assigned to our group. We refined the project in the following weeks and came up with a good concept for this group project. I think if we had to do this project over again we would definitely need a coupe of weeks to play around with some ideas we each had in our individual spreads.

We got our book done at Village Copier and I think they did a good job overall. There was some issue with the some elements of a page bleeding on to other spreads but is was a very minor issue. I liked the contrast between the cover page and the inside pages. The different weighted page for the the cover was a good choice.

The challenge for me personally was just working on this project and other projects I had for other classes. Making enough time for it was hard but I still feel I did a good amount work for my spreads. Before we sent it out refined the project even more so each page looked liked it belonged together in the book. I think this helped to make our book look better than it was before.

jingyi chen_for Dec.19th

I did the final project called “Stupid Law in the United States” with other two group members which Cythia and Manny. At the very beginning of the research together, we decided this topic by Cythia’s idea because we though it is interesting and also at the same time it is challenging. We were not only wanted to create illustration to describe each law in each page. If “Stupid Laws” only with text on a book, it could be bored. We actually had to make something fancy and color book with eye-catching illustration.

After we pick “Stupid laws” from different states and arrange one law on each page. Every one was free to work on each page if some one had ideas came up. When we did the first draft we found problems with the difference in layout style, colors and text arrangement. Cythia was the leader to make every page unify so the color is not too much. The finish book was sending to Remson graphic, and it just needs one day to finish. The size is 8.5 by 11 in glossy paper with perfect binding in magazine style. I don’t satisfy with the printing outcome because it was not what I expected. It was not perfect binding, the book cover neither used hard cover.

However, I like this book became a physical book rather than a pdf. It was a great experience to read a book designed by teamed work . The Colors come out surprise me after read page by page.

Alicia Prieto for December 19th

I worked in a group with Rainie and Amanda. Our book ended up being about different cultural foods in the city. I was happy with the outcome, and it was changed from the original idea of holiday recipes. We had a tough time deciding what to focus on. If we had to do this again, I would choose something more personal that I could make into a book. Already I feel like I would recreate the book making process with family photographs or stories.

I was very happy with the book quality. It made it really worth all of the hard work. It is a completely different experience to see the finished product as a book. It often feels like books are sacred objects made on mysterious ways and this class dissipated all of those ides.

It was tough to work as a group on a single object. We compromised by focusing on content first then designing around it. We each went home and tried our own designs, then reconvened and blended them. In the end, the design was much different than any of us were expecting, and thats ok! It was challenging balancing this book with my other 4 classes. Google drive and email were the main places where we worked. The final product looks very good, however I made a mistake when sending out the book for printing and the cover suffered slightly because of it. The crop marks are visible on the back cover, ununfortunately. I was impressed with Blurbs book quality and how nice and professional the project looks!

Calvin Wang for Oct 24th

This project was very diverse and enjoyable because everyone was able to pick an interest and idea for this project. Each mini-zines are different and unique in their own way and none are alike or similar in any way. The only concern was that it was in black and white so we could not really see the mini-zines in their full color, full potentials.

The mini-zine that caught my attention was the New York one where they interviewed different New Yorkers from different part of New York. They were asked to describe New York City in one word and described themselves in three words as well as other places they have lived in New York City, favorite spots in New York City and their age. This stood out to me because I was born in New York City and grew up so it was interested to see what other New Yorkers think of New York City.

Overall the mini-zines worked out really great despite that it was all black and white, but I was taught that if a print does not work in black and white it will not work in color. I think most of the mini-zines worked out in black and white while some who used darker and more shade colors turned out to be too dark. But it was a great experience to go through the interest and topics in our class.

Calvin Wang for Nov 28th

Team: Calvin, Ashley, and Karen

Project: Recap of 2016

Aesthetic Summary: Events that blew up and expanded through the internet and social media in 2016. Events that most people would have heard or seen.

Printing Facility: MagCloud

Type of press it will be printed on: HP Indigo digital press

Number of colors: 4-6

Color profile: CMYK

Size: H: 8.5 W: 5.5

Pages: 20

Cover type: Glossy

Binding: Saddle Stitch

Paper finish: 100# text stock

Paper weight:

Paper brightness:

Bleed: .125″

Set up costs: 20 x $.0.20 = $3.20, Shipping: $19.52, Tax: $1.87

Minimum quantity: 1

Total cost:$24.59 (includes shipping)

Cost per unit: $3.20

Turnaround time: 7-9 days

Pros: Price for printing the book is cheap and MagCloud has inDesign templates to give us an idea of how the final print will look like as well as guidelines.

Cons: The cost of shipping for it to arrive on time is what takes up most of the cost.

Calvin Wang for Dec 5th

This week, me and my group partners attempt to complete the images by the weekend and critic them. We each were assigned 6 sketches to be done on paper before finalizing it on the computer and finish them there. Everyone also came up with catchy and funny headlines as well as text to describe the events. We also choose a font to matches our sketches to give it a hand crafted look to the book.

Calvin Wang for Dec 12