Oh No Snow!

The 'adverse weather conditions' have affected us quite badly. Deliveries have been backed up and, because we're in Helensburgh (45 minutes from the centre of Glasgow), we seem to be overly neglected.

Needless to say, we can't  guarantee delivery of print before Christmas. We can however, despite the weather, deliver fantastic design straight to your inbox!

The GAP logo redesign

You'll be aware that high street retailer Gap recently backed down on a redesign of their logo and reverted back to the old one. The new logo didn't go down well. There was a public outrage and the logo was denounced as many things, and not many of them good. The resulting competition (for fun) to redesign the logo is detailed on the blog below.

Gap redesign contest

My favourite is no. 75 which shows real class and would make a large corporation proud (of their 8 year old nephew who 'dabbles' a bit in Photoshop).

This reminds me of a few other controversial redesigns. Notably Quark, as detailed below:

Quark Logo redesign

and here

And again...

One of the problems here is that the lack of any market research is quite apparent. All too often there's a kind of arrogance that the six people on the management board seem to feel more qualified than the millions of customers that buy their products.
Unless it was all a ruse to drum up some needed publicity, in which case they've been hugely successful.

It's not all about the internet

One of the things that makes us different from internet based print and design companies is the fact that we're real people. We actually meet a lot of our customers face to face.

Recently we completed a job for a client who didn't have the internet. Coupled with the fact that they weren't too mobile, this was a blast from the past.

When most of our work these days deals with proofing through the email, this was a bit unusual. We visited her in her home, spoke through the details and took some photos of her job. We then hand delivered a rough proof the next day. The following day she called to say there were a couple of changes and asked if we would have to come out to see them. I spoke her through the changes over the phone and put the job into production.

We hand delivered the job and she was delighted. Delighted with the quality and design, as well as being delighted with the fact that we had lightened her load and walked her through the process step by step.

It's clear that the internet has made things easier for most people. However, there are always going to be important customers who, through one reason or another, are different. And it's the differences that make us who we are. 

Understanding Bleed

One of the important aspects of printing that a great many seem to not only misunderstand, but actively ignore, is the concept of bleed in print. Yes, even you designers out there!


Put at its most rudimentary, bleed is the area of your print job which will get cut off leaving you with image right at the edge of the finished product. It's a safety thing. Without bleed there's the risk of showing some blank white at the edge of the job where there should be print. For this explanation, I'm going to use a business card as an example.


'Printing isn't an exact science' is a statement I often repeat to clients. When ink is put to paper, whether its from a massive printing press or a small inkjet printer, there may be some movement in the machine. When a business card is cut down to its finished size, there needs to a small amount of leeway to allow for these errors and slight movements.


Bring on the concept of bleed.


The example below shows how the thought process of a printing job should begin. The red area is the area which will be cut off; the white area shows the cutting edge and the light green area is the safe area. Of course, you won't see any of these colours in your document; this is purely for clarification.

When creating a business card of say 85x55mm, we need to create our artwork slightly larger. Most modern applications allow you to do this when you set up a document. InDesign shows a section in the document setup detailing bleed area. Check with your printer. However, the standard is around 3mm extra all round.

When the document is printed we should see that the print extends beyond the crop marks.

A typical print may look something like this:

So when we cut it we end up with a nice business card printed right to the edge.

This process is used for leaflets, booklets, and any printed job with printing right to the edge.

Hope this has made some sense.

Sensible design tips #3

When I send you a proof, please uncheck 'fit to printable area' before printing out. If you don't uncheck this, your proof will not be the correct size and you will no doubt come back to me and tell me that the logo at the top of your letterhead needs to be nearer the top, or the text needs to be nearer the bottom. And depending on your printer, these differences could be fairly significant.

Uncheck 'fit to printable area'!

Also, while we're on about PDFs; please make sure that Overprint preview is selected. With all the fancy effects and stylish transparency that I will no doubt include in your proof, we would hope that you could at least view it correctly on screen.

Yes, Adobe should make this a default setting, but for some reason they don't.

Sensible design tips #2

Faxing your letterhead to me will show me neither the paper it's printed on nor the colour reference of your logo!

Sensible Design tips #1

Saving a JPG as an Illustrator EPS does not make it a vector graphic!