1. Check your product requirements

Unlike normal photo-illustrated print products, for products that embrace the trendy ‘flat design’, there are always various printing methods that you can opt for in order to save costs as well as to achieve the best quality.
In our project to issue the ‘Examinations and Vaccinations during Pregnancy – A Booklet for Parents’, we adopted ‘flat design’ as our main design language. Targeting mothers-to-be, we chose a bright, eye-catching color palette in combination with cheerful illustrations for the booklet. We didn’t put so many colors in the design, so our top requirement was that the color must be displayed as precisely as possible, especially the theme colors green and orange.

For print products, especially those that are made for your client’s brand, color precision should always be your number-one goal. This is to ensure that the brand’s guidelines, the designer’s intentions, as well as the client’s requirements are being fulfilled. The way to confirm this is by looking at a proof print – a high-quality test version of your product, which serves as the basis for you to evaluate the printing process, as well as for the client to grant official approval for the design before proceeding with printing in large quantities.

2. Common problems

With the CMYK color system, we have encountered major problems with poor-quality proofs where the colors are inaccurate or just badly smudged. To produce the green color as used in our booklet design, the cyan layer and the yellow layer are placed on top of each other. However, due to some particular reasons at the moment when our proof was printed, the two colors couldn’t blend, creating unwanted color patches and smudges.

To solve this problem, the print technician suggested a solution to use pre-mixed ink, which means instead of printing the two colors cyan and yellow one by one, the technician would mix the two inks together in advance to create the desired green color. In addition to that, he also made a new printing plate for using this new ink. This is a helpful tip that we want to share with you.

There are a lot more problems that you may have to deal with from time to time when it comes to printing. They include inaccurate color tones, color layers not lining up perfectly, etc. In fact, these are common technical problems you can run into when working with small printing houses. On the contrary, if you choose a large and reputable printing house, you can rest assured that they will be handled professionally.

The orange banner and the woman's skin have distinctly different hues in the 2 prints.

The prints have very different hues

3. Three things you should look out for when choosing your printing service

Depending on the needs and budget of the client (or sometimes, of the designing agency itself), you may want to have various printing house options.

Before closing a deal with a printing house, you will need to visit and check out the place yourself to make sure it is eligible to take on your printing jobs with satisfying quality. These are the things that you should look out for when you’re at the printing house:

- The facilities: A spacious and clean printing house with appropriate arrangement of different functional areas is probably a sign that your products will be made with top quality, minimizing unnecessary errors during the printing process.

- The printers: Although a large number of printers is important to ensure that your time requirement will be met, the most crucial part is still printer quality. Many printing houses in Vietnam, especially newly-established and small ones, choose to equip themselves with used printers in order to save startup costs. This would significantly affect the quality of your products. For this reason, printing houses with good investment in printers (large printers, new printers etc.) must be given top priority.

- The technicians: They play a major role in putting out perfect prints for you. They are responsible for the adjustment of colors and the making of printing plates among other things. A simple mistake they make can lead to a big change in the final product. If the technicians are careful, meticulous, and highly-experienced in printing, your print products will surely get the highest quality possible.

By SDMedia