Join author Claudia McCue on a journey that introduces the printing process and reveals the keys to designing a document that prints as well as it looks onscreen. This course takes you on the floors of two commercial print houses (BurdgeCooper and Lithographix), to better understand the life cycle of a print job and observe printing presses in action. Along the way, discover how to better communicate with your printer, choose the correct paper, inks, colors, and fonts for your project, and how to correctly lay out your documents in Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. This course is designed to help you and your printer produce a professionally finished print job, whether it's a business card, brochure, or multipage magazine.

lynda.com thanks the BurdgeCooper and Lithographix printing companies for access to their facilities and permission to film on site.

 

Topics include:

• Understanding the importance of contact proofs
• Handling corrections and alterations
• Choosing from offset, letterpress, thermographic, or digital printing options
• Understanding how the inks, colors, and paper interact
• Building a document at the correct size
• Folding and trimming
• Choosing fonts
• Working in Illustrator with swatches, effects, and more
• Laying out a document in InDesign
• Generating a final PDF
• Troubleshooting print issues
• Preflighting your print job in Acrobat