Athenia Design

Have you ever designed a layout that includes blue only to find when it goes to the printers the colour prints as purple or pink. This is because in the CMYK process some blues that look blue on the computer screen tend to print purple. Also, the lighter the blue, the more purple it gets. For example, a blue gradient that starts with a deep blue will more than likely start to turn purple as it gets lighter. Also if you use the 100% blue in Quark you are likely to end up with a purple-looking colour in CMYK because the levels of magenta it contains are too high. Many people get around this by using a Pantone colour blue that will print as you see it on screen. I also find that a blue with the following values seems to print correctly. C 100 M 65 Y 0 K 0.

I tend to use automatic page numbers in Quark, mainly because if you need to add or a delete a page from a layout, Quark will automatically renumber the pages for you. To use the automatic page numbering feature, you need to go into the master pages double clicking on the master page item below (where it says A-Master A).

The master pages in Quark can basically be used as a templete to create any items that you want to appear on each page of the publication. I tend to use them for headers and footers but you can also add columns, text boxes and other elements depending on what you need. You can also create different sets of master pages for different sections of your publication.



















To add the automatic page number to the publication, simply create a text box and press the apple key and 3 where you want the page number to be placed. If you have done it correctly you should see and icon that looks like this <#> (see below). This acts as a place holder and you will notice when you create pages, Quark will automatically number them throughout the publication, starting from the number you specify.




To specify which page number you want the publication to start on double click on the page you want the numbering to start on, then choose page, section from the menu and enter the number you want to start on and the format, ie if you want the numbering to be numerical, alphbetical or roman numerals.

I found this cool video showing some really interesting examples of what artists do in their spare time.

I was chatting to a friend the other day who had been told by an advertising agency that Quark is not compatible between the PC and the Mac. I’m not quite sure where the advertising agency found their information because I have been using Quark successfully between the PC and Mac for around six years now. On one project I spent a lot of time working with style sheets between Quark on a PC and Quark on a Mac. I found with this that as long as the style sheets have all the same names they import perfectly. Saying this you can experience some slight text reflow between the Mac and PC versions of Quark. This is usually caused by the fact that the fonts differ slightly between the two systems. I would be interested to hear from other people that have worked with Quark on cross platform projects.

I was doing some work in Quark the other day and started getting strange “unknown errors” on a document that prevented me from either modifying it in any way or even saving it. A few years ago I would have persevered with the document and tried to find the root cause of the problem. Now, I just put it down to Quark being Quark and realise its one of little problems that occurs from time to time. My advice is, don’t bother messing around with the corrupted file, simply create a new document, and group your layout. Then paste it into the new document and give it a different name, for me it fixes the problem every time.

One problem I come across is people who send through images that are web quality, around 72 dpi and expect the image to be good enough for a printed publication. Often people think just because the images looks fine on their screen it will print well in a publication. As a rule most images for printed media should be at least 300 dpi. Resolution refers to the number of dots per inch (dpi), or the amount of detail the image has. Higher resolution means a more detailed image and also larger file size. You can check this by opening the images in Photoshop and checking the resolution in the image size menu. Also, as a rough guide you can click view actual pixels, to check the quality. If it appears blurred or grainy or very small, then the file is poor quality and this is how it will print.

I had this picture of some poached pears which I wanted to post on one of my blogs. The only problem was the bowl looked a bit messy. To make it look a bit better I thought I would clean it up a bit in photoshop. This is where the clone stamp tool is really useful. First you need to select a brush size from the brushes menu. Then you need to select the area you want to clone. I chose a clean area of the blue bowl. Next press alt to define the cloning area. The tool will basically copy this area so you can clone it to other areas. Now simply click over the areas you want to clean, in this case the red stains on the bowl. I also cleaned up the left hand side of the bowl where you can see a small chip. On this area I selected a smaller brush and cloned part of the rim and table, before clicking over the area with the chip to correct it. If you like the look of the recipe, it will shortly be appearing on my personal blog.

 

This is a very basic tip which can affect the quality of the printed publication. The difference between CMYK and RGB is as follows.

CMYK is made up of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. These are the colours that are used in the printing process. For example if you use a colour printer you will notice it usually has four cartridges one for each of these colours.

RGB is made up of Red, Green and Blue. These are the colours used by screen displays such as your monitor.

Basically all images that are to be used to for printed media should be in CMYK format and all images to be used for web format should be in RGB. You will notice that there are limitations with the range of colours that can be produced using CMYK, RGB colours often appear much brighter on the screen but these colours cannot be produced to the same brightness when printed.