Over the past few weeks, JPA has been making major improvement to our website. Giving it a face lift, so to speak, for the new web 2.0 world that we live in. Part of the thinking behind the new web presence was to offer more self-services to our customers and potential clients. This week we have started the first of several phases to accomplish this goal by debuting the “Quick Quote”.
JPA’s Quick Quote is a simple form that can be accessed at the bottom of our new website. Once opened a prospective client can enter information about their project and we can deliver a quote within 24 hours. The Quick Quote system is the first step of many to improve our accessibility through our internet presence. You can get your quote Here. Or visit the website.
Taking your own photos for a project? If so, then let us offer some tips on getting the best quality image out of your camera and onto your printed materials. The following are a few things to remember when taking your own photographs for a project.
First, remember to adjust your camera settings to shoot larger and more quality photographs. An electronic image is at its best printable quality at 300 DPI, or Dots Per Inch. 300 DPI allows us at JPA to not only print crisper and cleaner images, but gives us a bit of leeway if we have to adjust or resize the image. In most cameras the medium to high setting will obtain this DPI, but it is best to refer to your camera’s manual.
The second thing to remember is the importance of good camera orientation. Landscape photos, or photos that are taken with the camera held normally, and portrait photos, which are pictures taken with the camera on its side, can drastically effect or confuse a rather simple project. As a general rule, If you’re unsure if the picture you are taking is going to work as a landscape or a portrait you should shoot as a landscape. From a design perspective, a landscape picture is 10 times easier to make into a portrait than the other way around.
Finally there is the issue of the files themselves. If you are supplying photos and have been using a photo manipulation software like Photoshop, then it is in your best interest to save the files as Tiffs. When your digital camera takes a picture it saves that picture as a Jpeg. Jpegs are an acceptable file type for most editing software, however they are compressed files and every time they are opened and resaved they lose a bit of quality. Tiffs are uncompressed and can be manipulated without losing any image quality.
Although they are often dated as far back as 15th century China, modern business cards are an adaptation to the 19th century French practice of visiting cards, wherein an individual would hand out a personal card during social engagements as a way to streamline introductions. These cards were often lavishly ornate and very popular among the 19th century upper class societies. It was around this time in America where businesses began using the same practice as a way to advertise a business’s location. Business cards were handed out to potential client prospects, and to customers as a subtle way to tell people that a bill was due.
Eventually the practice of visitor cards disappeared while business cards remained a mainstay in business. Today business cards are more commonly used than ever. Advances in printing technology and new QR Code technologies have further reinforced the business card as a necessity for any company.
Designing business cards can be a daunting process. Fitting a lot of contact information into the limited space of the 3.5 x 2 inch template can be restrictive to any design process. Here are some tips from our in-house design experts on laying out a business card that is both functional and cost effective to produce.
Fonts: Stick to one or two fonts with little size and style variations. Certain information needs to standout, but too many fonts and text sizes will cause confusion.
Alignment: Though the majority of the cards we see are center aligned, don’t underestimate a left or right alignment. This opens up more space for longer emails and other artwork while making the card appear less cluttered.
Colors: Use them! Either a spot color or 4 color process, colors are an easy way to add pop to your company’s identity.
Information: Thorough but not overwhelming. Phone number, email, cell phone number, address, and website, are all standard while @Twitter names, Facebook page information and linkedin profile links are better placed on your website or email signature.
An often integral part of any company is its portable identification, or its business card. As a print company we have printed countless business cards for an innumerable amount of companies. From large 100,000 card runs to the small 250 card starter batches, we are suited to handle any and all business card demands. This month’s Issue will focus on the business card as an important item to your company’s brand identity, while delivering some advice to help facilitate an easy and cost effective process for your next card order.
What card is right for you?
Jersey Printing offers a full range of options however the most common are digitally printed cards and offset printed cards. Digitally printed cards are cheaper to produce and allow for quick and easy reprints, while offset printed cards are usually more expensive and produce a higher quality product. We usually find companies that depend on a more professional image spend the money to produce a more formal card that matches the companies color and style, while digital cards are seen in start-up companies, companies who do a lot of tradeshows, have a high employee turnover, or are less focused on the company branding. Due to its low cost and JPA’s exclusive digital printing techniques and in-house design team, there is a very minimal loss of quality between the two processes.
Quick Fact: Digital printing is not always cheaper! Larger runs, usually in the 5000 card range, are often cheaper to be produced on the offset press.
“My pictures should be Tiffs?” A common question we get from a lot of our newer designers, or web designers looking to make hard media. The answer is yes and no, technically newer rip software and other inline software will be able to render most file types, however it is in best practice to use the Tiff format. At JPA all packaged non-vector artwork is changed into a tiff format. This allows us the greatest chance of producing the highest quality product.
Back in the mid 1980’s there was a great boom in scanner technology. Scanners were becoming easier to build and more accessible to the small businesses. Different manufacturers used different file types when saving their scanned images. TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) was invented as a way to unify the files under a single format, eventually it was acquired by Aldus and then Adobe. Tiff is now one of the more reliably compatible file formats out there.
Why use tiff? Because it’s lossless. Lossless is a computer graphics term that means that the file is uncompressed and thus of higher image quality. Other formats like jpegs are lossy and are compressed for creating smaller file sizes. This compression takes away from the quality of the image. Unfortunately, Once an image has been turned into a JPEG, it can’t be reverted back into a Lossless file by changing it back into a Tiff, however our in-house practices involve “Tiffing” all jpeg files to prevent further compression if for some reason we need to go in and tweak a photo or two.
The great thing about printing, is that it’s not just ink on paper. Occasionally we get the opportunity to print some very complicated projects, that once completed, make us quite proud. The project I am speaking of was a flip book instruction manual. It sits in a stand made of 18pt stock that we scored and bound into the product. The pages, 66 of them were printed on 14pt, stock and 4 pages were tab die cut and the front cover was silk laminated for protection. The entire project was then spiralbound to produce the flip presentation book. Whew…pretty neat huh! It was a fun project and it came out perfect. Thank you UMDNJ-TB for your faith in us, it was a fun project.
Amongst all the industry standard graphics programs none are as widely know as Adobe Photoshop or “Photoshop” for short. A Ph.D student at Michigan University named Thomas Knoll, who was trying to develop a way to display a grayscale images on a monochrome display, developed the program in 1987. Having succeeded in his efforts, John Knoll, his brother, expressed an interest in tweaking the project into a photo-editing program. With their combined talents the duo created a simple editing program called “ImagePro,” which was later renamed Photoshop and purchased by Adobe Systems. Since it’s initial Macintosh exclusive release in 1990, Photoshop has been updated 12 times into its newest version: CS5, codenamed “White Rabbit.”
However rare, every now and then we get a job that challenges us on both a creative and production level. This time that job was the 50th Anniversary Ad Journal for Christian Brothers Academy. Like the majority of these projects, CBA’s started out as a simple concept and bloomed into a 152 page, notch bound, 6-color showpiece that contained a whopping 385 different pictures and ads, and had a total packaged file size of 24 gigabytes!
The project was put together in a short 2 months and was supplemented by a DVD documentary about the school. Johnathon Pfleger, of the graphic design team had this to say about the journal: “Definitely one of our more interesting projects, the amount of photos and ads alone required the skills of all of our designers. But as usually, all the work was justified when we got to see the finished project, it looked awesome!”
Congratulations to Christian Brothers Academy on their 50 year anniversary.
Each piece of movable type, including letter forms, punctuation, and blank spaces, was originally made by hand. Some printers created their own typefaces, also called fonts. Some of these fonts are still used today. Garamond, for example, is on many computers and is named after the French printer Claude Garamond
