rockpaperink

September 12, 2012

Maximize the Opportunities that Print makes Possible

Understanding Publications

Author: Laurel Saville

IdN, international designer's network magazine,is a showcase for design from all over the world. Each issue has a theme, planned as much as six months in advance, to which designers contribute, creating a publication that is chockablock with powerful images and artwork. Publisher Laurence Ng explains how his team uses the power of the printing press to make all this design shine individually and the magazine work as a whole: "Our job is to make the artwork more presentable and more visually impactful," he says. "Most of it has a lot of visual impact already, but because there are so many different articles, and we don't want them to crash, we have to package them individually. So, we use different page layouts, printing techniques and even, in some cases, different paper, to make them look different."This means magazines are printed in at least six colors, with sometimes up to six different papers, a few different varnishes, and even different-size sheets in a single issue.

One of the ways IdN keeps everything from becoming too crazy is by using a grid for individual articles, but no overall grid for the magazine as a whole. While Ng readily admits that this process—which requires them to do all prepress work in-house and sometimes work with several different printers in several different countries on a single issue—is a "nightmare," the results are spectacular. "A lot of designers out there still want to feel and touch. On the website, you don't feel the paper, the print quality, so we still want to produce quality magazines," he says.

Source: 100 Habits of Successful Publication Designers

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