December 24, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the prepres operation, the machines were a buzz with seasonal calendars and one-of-a-kind photo books.

I visited one the Bay Area’s leading digital printers yesterday, and their Kodak NexPresses were humming away to print all the Kodak Easy Share calendars that had been ordered by consumers all over America. Numerous qualified NexPress owners are contracted by Kodak to print and ship these orders, and the printer I visited yesterday had stacks and stacks of calendar orders in the queue.

Kodak accepts the orders online, and then drops PDF files of finished calendars onto the servers of the participating printers. The printers have to produce, bind, package and ship within hours. And, yesterday was hectic, as it was the last day possible to print and ship in time for Christmas eve delivery.
...Read More
Industries: Digital Printing, New Products, Press

December 21, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

As all bloggers probably do, I read the blogs (I have to keep up with the competition!). And, the blog topic that is getting the most attention this week is not related to shoe-throwing or who bid the most for an available Illinois Senate seat.

It is about the Spranq Eco Sans type font. Seriously. This is a font, designed by Spranq, a Dutch marketing company, that has holes in the middle of the strokes to save ink. The company took a Verdana look-alike font and punched holes in the center of all the letters. The holes are not perfectly round, but slightly ovoid, and they run down the middle of each letter. The idea is that the letters, when they print, will require less ink or toner, and that the Earth will be saved as a result. Spranq argues that the user of the font would save as much as 20% on ink when using their font.

...Read More
Industries: New Products, Premedia

December 18, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

While cleaning up the mess I call my office yesterday, I found a wonderful relic from my childhood. It is the type sampler from the Teenage Print Shop, my first business. I had 19 fonts in my collection back then, and I printed an alphabet of each on a single card 5 x 6.5 in. in size. I had a pretty good selection of types: one 24 pt. display font, a handful of 18 pt. faces in serif and sans serif variations, two sizes of Old English (misnamed, but you get the idea), and one script – Kauffman 18 pt.

...Read More
Industries: New Products, Premedia

December 18, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

While cleaning up the mess I call my office yesterday, I found a wonderful relic from my childhood. It is the type sampler from the Teenage Print Shop, my first business. I had 19 fonts in my collection back then, and I printed an alphabet of each on a single card 5 x 6.5 in. in size. I had a pretty good selection of types: one 24 pt. display font, a handful of 18 pt. faces in serif and sans serif variations, two sizes of Old English (misnamed, but you get the idea), and one script – Kauffman 18 pt.

...Read More
Industries: New Products, Premedia

December 15, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

One of the features of Adobe Photoshop that I use often is the Web Gallery function. With that you can select a folder full of photos and turn them into a nice gallery that is itself a web site. Once uploaded to a web server, it can be viewed by anyone with a browser and an Internet connection. I have made 131 web galleries in the last two years.

The process of making a Web Gallery is handled by Photoshop Automation scripts, and it can be time consuming. Despite the time needed, the results are excellent. And I have, on occasion, modified the HTML code created by Photoshop to add links and further customize my gallery pages. If you know a little bit about HTML you can do this with find-and-replace functions in a word processor.

...Read More
Industries: New Products, Premedia