I'm a graphic designer from Melbourne with a passion for logo design, brand identity, web and print, working worldwide.

As you no doubt know, no 2 screens are the same. Due to manufacturing differences, software settings, and the age of your screen, each display shows colour differently. When printing this obviously creates a problem.

If your working on corporate ID using Pantone colours having a 100% accurate screen probably isn’t critical as you’ll be referring to your Pantone swatch book for colours and will know exactly what to expect. For anything full colour your monitor needs to be right. Continue reading...

While digging through the mountain of my archived study notes and projects from my diploma, I dug up a little reference guide I was given with some of the more detailed terms involved with professional printing.

I thought I’d share this for any up-and-coming designers who might still be a little unsure on what’s what. If you’ve taken an interest in this post I’ll assume you know the basics such as bleed, trim, process colour etc… Continue reading...

I recently began a job for a client to design a brochure for their patient care service, the project is small budget and to be printed in CMYK only. Everything was going fine then someone said it, brown text.

While extremely accurate, printers are not 100% perfect. There is inevitably a tiny amount of misregistration between the 4 layers of ink.

In this case, mixing the 4 colours to create brown, if you imagine the layers of cyan, magenta and yellow being slightly off centre from the black, they create coloured halos around the text as pictured above.

When printing headings or large text this isn’t a problem, but applying this to a body of 8pt type has the potential to create quite a mess. Continue reading...

Have you ever had something printed only to find the final product isn’t quite the colour you expected? A likely cause is the paper used.

Different stocks produce different colours when using the exact same colour ink. If you’re familiar with Pantone colours at all you’ve probably noticed there are seemingly multiple instances of the same colour. 200u, 200m, 200c etc.

On screen these all look the same, on paper these colours will be printed on un-coated, matte and coated stock respectively and produce variations of colours despite the exact same ink being used. This is due to the different absorbent properties of the stock. Continue reading...

You might think that using black couldn’t be simpler. After all, black is black right? Wrong. Depending on what printing/ink system is being used their are literally dozens of choices when it comes to choosing a black, each with distinct differences.

Fellow designer Andrew Kelsall recently posted a designers guide to using black, over at his U.K. based graphic design blog. Continue reading...