Chas has a great post up that encapsulates what all logo designers think but can not say. The best part of it, of course, is the following sentence:
Anyone who’s worked with me probably realizes I don’t mind offending people (and I barely consider graphic designers to be people) in hopes of improving the work.
This moment of candor explains so much…
Check out this great issue of an old baseball magazine. That’s Joe D on the cover and as a die hard Yankee fan, I can categorically assure you that he is not, in fact, getting soft.
The New Jersey Community Development Corporation’s website, my first collaboration with the wildly talented developer Bill Harle of 90% Gravity, is now live. Check it out.
I hit on a bit of a work-around using OS X’s incredible Time Machine application today. AgencyND operates off a central server where our job files are stored and backed up. We try not to work locally. Time Machine, as you are probably aware, only archives files on the Macintosh Hard Drive, so while it does a great job backing up my iTunes library and whatever files I have laying around the desktop, it does very little in the way of serving as a quick back up application for my all-important work documents.Â
Today it occurred to me that if, instead of packaging InDesign jobs directly to the server, I wrote the package folder to the desktop first and then dragged it into the appropriate folder on the server using the finder, I’d leave behind an exact copy of the Package folder on the desktop for Time Machine to grab and back up. The trick is to only work from the server files, never the desktop files and to make sure to delete the files off the desktop fairly frequently (like every night before leaving the office, for example).
Now I get the best of both worlds: a central, back up server that diligently archives my most valuable files, AND Time Machine which is there to catch me on the rare but devastating occasions when deleted file emergencies develop.
You’ve completed the project, the client 7,057th revision is complete and they’ve signed off on the final proof. It’s time to prepare your InDesign file for submission. Before you hit File>Package and burn your CD, here’s what you should pay attention to in order to do this properly:
Use the Links panel under Window>Links to see if you have all of your images properly linked. Are there any yellow triangles or red circles?
A yellow triangle with a little exclamation point next to an image file name means that you have a Modified File. This just means that something has changed in the linked file itself, and the file has been saved without InDesign updating the revisions. The good news is, your file(s) still exist, InDesign just needs to be prompted to reexamine the file (so to speak) and account for what ever has been modified. Fix it by clicking on the image file name in the links panel, clicking on the options arrow and selecting “Update Link.”
You have a missing link. Either the linked file has been moved to a new folder and InDesign no longer “knows” where it is, or the linked file has been deleted. Fix it by clicking on the link’s file name in the Links panel so that it turns blue, then select “Relink File” from the Links panel options menu. You’ll get a dialogue box that will allow you to find the file so that InDesign can reestablish it’s link. If the file has been modified at all, the circle will change to a Yellow Triangle as in the paragraph above. You’d fix it in the same way.
If you’ve deleted the file, go to your back-up disk and recover it. (You DO keep a backup right?)
Look at your Links panel again, notice that the links are organized in page order. If the top-most link file name or group of link file names has the letters “PB” next to it, you have a linked file on your Paste Board. That means that there is an image somewhere in the document that is a perfectly normal placed image, it just exists outside the little black line that indicates the edge of the page. The area outside that line is called the “Paste Board,” more then likely because that’s what Graphic Designers called this area when dinosaurs roamed the earth and typesetting houses thought the good times would never end.
If there’s an image on the Paste Board, and it’s not actually supposed to be in your document, it’s just going to take up space on your submission disk unnecessarily. Unless you intended to keep it there, for reasons that make sense to you, you may as well delete these images. Chances are they got dragged onto the Paste Board as part of another step and forgotten or they accidentally hitched a ride with other content when you did a copy/paste in place. At any rate, you can fix your “PB” images by deleting them. If you don’t know where they are in the document, click on the link’s file name in the Links panel, then click on the options arrow and select “Go to Link.”
This is a big one, because if you’re sending your files for a typical off-set printing or digital printing job, unless otherwise instructed, the printer is going to require 4C process image files which means all of your images have to be in the CMYK color mode (Grayscale images are okay for submission). I don’t know of an at-a-glance way to make sure that your files are saved in CMYK. InDesigns Swatches panel has a great 4 color icon that indicates when colors are CMYK, but the corresponding area in the Links panel is given over to the page number location of each image instead.
The way I check for color mode is to click on the top-most link file name in the Links panel and then click on Link Information. (Notice that Adobe helpfully puts “Link File Info” directly above this selection, but “Link Information” is what we need). You will see this dialogue box:
“Color Space” tells me that this link is RGB. I need to open this file in Photoshop change it’s color mode to CMYK and then save it. As long as I don’t change the file name, InDesign will either automatically update the file for me, or prompt me to update the file with the Yellow Triangle described above.
Back to the Link Information dialogue box for a second. It’s very possible that you have more then one RGB image linked in your document, to check, click the Next button and it will take you to the next Link down the list. Continue until you have checked every file. Don’t be surprised if some of your links have no colors space setting. Most placed vector files (for example, .ai files from Illustrator) will not carry a color space designator so they will appear with no color setting in this window.
My co-worker, who is a brilliant designer, is fond of using the Pantone Color chip book for color inspiration. This is a great idea…as long as you’re aware that pantone colors are spot colors, which put simply means that they require more inks then the 4 inks used in 4 color process printing.
The way to tell if you have spot colors is not to look at the names of the swatches, necessarily. (It’s possible to change a PMS color to a process color and keep the name of the color intact). Rather, you want to go to the Swatches panel and check the icons in the right hand column. Any little icons that look like a dark circle inside a square represent spot colors. This is what the icon looks like:
Unless your job specifically calls for a spot color, and the client is cool with paying a little more on the printing, you need to change this color to process before submitting it. Double click on the color and in the dialogue box that appears change the Color Mode pull down menu to “CMYK.” Then change the “Color Type” pull down menu from “Spot” to “Process.” If you’ve done this right, when you click okay, the little spot color icon should turn into a gray square (like the one next to “Gold Color” in the illustration.
Do you have extra color swatches in the Swatches panel that aren’t actually called for anywhere in the document? The way to check is to click on the options arrow in the Swatches panel and select “Select All Unused.” This will highlight all of the color chips in the panel that aren’t in use in the document. You don’t need these, you can safely delete them by dragging them to the trash can at the bottom of the panel.
If you have two instances of the same Pantone Color, you need to delete one of them. Drag one to the trash and when prompted, select the remaining swatch to replace the one you’re deleting. This can happen if you have PMS colors embedded in linked files with the same name as PMS colors that are already set in InDesign.
It can also happen if you specify “Pantone Solid Coated” in one place, and (for example) “Pantone Solid Uncoated” elsewhere. The “Coated” and “Uncoated” distinction refers to the paper you’re going to be printing on. There are different sets of PMS inks for whatever sheet you are printing on. The tones are the same or similar and the designating numbers are the same (except for a “C” or a “U” for example, at the end of the number). InDesign recognizes them as two separate colors.
9 times out of 10, this means that you have a spot color specified in a linked vector .eps or .ai file. You need to open all of your vector files, go to the “swatches” panel in Illustrator and delete all the unused colors. Spot colors in Illustrator are indicated by a white corner tab with a tiny black dot in the lower right corner of the Swatch. Double click the ones that are left and change them from Spot colors to Process colors. Then save your Illustrator document and close it. You should now be able to delete this obstinate pantone color from your InDesign swatch panel.
Go to Type>Find Fonts and check. You’ll get a list here of all of the fonts that are active in the document. Available, active fonts will have a True Type or Open Type or similar icon next to them. Missing fonts will have a Yellow Triangle. To fix missing fonts, you either need to find and activate the missing font (the easiest way is probably to do a global search on your server for the font’s file name as it’s probably been used in another file), or you have replace the font with another font. To do this, click on the missing font and then select the font you want to replace it with in the pull down menu at the bottom. Then click “change all.”
Note: if you accidentally click in an empty shape frame in InDesign using the type tool, you automatically change the image frame into a text frame.
This text frame will automatically carry the basic paragraph default style, so if you find that you have a missing font, and that font is “Times” and you know you didn’t use Times in your design (because no one uses Times in their design) , this is probably where it’s hiding. You can click on “Find Next” to check, and if the font is just a space at the beginning of an otherwise empty text frame, it’s probably safe to replace the font with another font from the document.
Bleeds are images or colors that go all the way to the edge of the paper. In order to allow for proper trimming at the printer you have to carry these image and color areas all the way over the border of the page for at least an eight of an inch on every edge where you have bleeds.
Do not line up color and images on the exact edge of the page. The rule of thumb is: If it touches the page border, make sure it overlaps the page border.
oAk is a web and print designer with AgencyND, the on-campus design office at the University of Notre Dame.
I'm also a freelance designer from South Bend, Indiana.