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Pro Tips for Preparing Your CD ArtworkBy: Dante FerrariniDante Ferrarini is the Art Director for the NEMO Music Conference, and the Kahlua Boston Music Awards - he is also the owner of Rabid Iguana Audio/Visual, an art oriented CD manufacturing firm. Contact: Rabid Iguana Audio/Visual (617) 787-7761 |
| There are many creative individuals who are excellent visual artists, however, the digital world of computer graphics offers some technical barriers which you must overcome to produce professional results. This is an era when everyone with a computer and image manipulation/layout software attempts to be a graphic artist.� As a designer and owner of a Design/CD Duplication firm I can tell you that most client related problems, delays, misunderstandings, etc., occur for one main reason - technical problems within customer supplied art. The printer's world is very different than the digital designer's world: printers deals with color separations, spot colors, bleeds, trapping, offset printing, and heavy duty machinery. Most of these concepts are foreign to standard computer art. I'm writing this column to help educate all the creative bands out there who have ideas for their designs, and to get YOU to produce more satisfying results. You should start by having the exact specs/templates for the layout you will create. Most duplicators use different machines and therefore have different specs. DO NOT send film without having checked with your duplicator.� Oftentimes you'll be able to download templates, or get them sent to you (email/on-disk). As long as you have the correct measurements, you can always create you own template. After you've designed your CD/Poster etc., you should proof your work and set it up for FILM output, which is the crucial issue. Having to prepare the files for submission to a duplicator, or a digital output firm for film production is an often overlooked, yet critical factor in order for your art to reproduce correctly. A few standard guidelines to keep in mind are: one, graphic art is still a Macintosh based domain: Mac files laid out in Quark Xpress are the most common (with PageMaker and Illustrator close follow-ups). If you design on PC most fo these apply - but you might have to make the files useable to a MAC environment, please check the paragraph after the following checklist. You should cover ALL of the following steps: 1. Always supply every font needed (most time delays and disasters happen for this reason alone!), and make sure that each font you supply has its PostScript equivalent (When film is produced, the imagesetter needs the PostScript files to render your font properly, without it, they will print as a default font (commonly Courier, Helvetica). 2. Make sure that you include all the images/links necessary for your layout. a. Make sure that color images are TIFF, or EPS (supply fonts embedded) b. At a minimum of 300dpi resolution. c. Saved in CMYK mode *** NO RGB (will ouput as grayscale!) d. Bitmap images should be betwen 800-1200dpi resolution. 3. Make sure that the layout� will separate into CMYK, unless you need spot colors (spot colors, generally PANTONE colors are separate inks than the 4-color process - usually CDs themselves are silkscreened with Pantone inks.) 4. You will probably have a hard time with colormatching (still one of the greater challenges of computer based art) - unless you know your monitor, or it is calibrated to certain specs - it will not be a reliable source for your colormatching. (A common problem is printing that is �too dark'... a quick precaution you can take is to tone down the brightness controls of your monitor, or simply add some brightness/saturation to the images) 5. Always supply a hard copy (Color is always preferred, but laser grayscale will do) If your PC design will be output from a Macintosh you should save your final layouts (whether they are Quark, Pagemaker, Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Photoshop files) as EPS files. The EPS files should then be opened up in a photo editing program and resaved as TIFF images (because the embedded PC fonts in an EPS image will usually not be available on a Mac). If you do this, however, know that any text will be screened as an image when printed- it will still be clear (@ 150 lpi) but not as crisp as the PostScript font itself. This is one of the many ways you can easily maneuver files within different environments. Keep in mind that if the firm has Power Macs (who doesn't now?) and Mac versions of your fonts, they'll be able to open your Pagemaker/Quark./Illustrator files without many hassles. We have covered the basics for you, keep in mind that there plenty more variables, and as you keep doing it you will discover all the details and intricacies of desktop publishing. I hope this will clarify some frequently asked questions and help eradicate unwanted incidents with your artwork. Your experience with any company should be not only pleasant, but smooth and efficient. You also need to know what you're talking about!� Please note that if some of the information above is confusing to you, you may need to learn more about your design software before attempting to create film-ready graphics. Good luck with all your projects, and please, get in touch if you have more questions. |