Premedia Trends   

This past weekend was the California International Choral Festival, a biennial event hosted by the San Luis Obispo Vocal Arts Ensemble, of which I am a member and singer. I am responsible for the web site, much of the photography, and some of the print. My wife is the program designer, and I am the printer/mounter/framer/super-title man for the festival. At the end of each of the Festival sessions I returned home with hundreds of photos, and I built web galleries for the festival’s web site, and posted them for the public and the participating choirs to see.

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“ScottG” asked, in a comment on my last Hexachrome blog, about how I will be proofing the Great Hexachrome Experiment of 2009. The answer is simple: I’ll proof the job on one of the university’s two 9800 ink-jet printers on Epson Luster paper.

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The audience sat in stunned silence as 200 singers joined together to sing “O Premedia!” in a rousing finale…. (I’m making that up. It was actually a work by Jean Sibelius called A Song of Peace).


How many? 300, you say? In fact there were exactly 179 people in the choir. The reason I know is that I use Photoshop’s Count tool to put a number on the head of every member of the choir to get a precise count of t...Read More

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The title on my name badge says it: Audio Visual. In my vast amount of spare time I sing tenor in the San Luis Obispo Vocal Arts Ensemble, an adult community choir of some repute. We have traveled and participated in many international choral competitions, and have brought home some impressive awards and honors.


About ten years back our director said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun to put on a choral festival at home?” and we all responded in the affirmative. With years of planning, endless hours ...Read More

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In my last blog I mentioned that I am in the middle of a color printing project; my role is representing the designer at meetings with the printer and the client. I have been working with the printer, a local firm with good equipment and good intentions.


The client meeting took place yesterday midday. The printer showed up with press sheets of the test run, and a portable GTI viewing booth. It was a strange coincidence that earlier in the morning I was attendi...Read More

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Adobe InDesign assumes – correctly – that anything in an InDesign document that is already in CMYK should not be converted to a different CMYK when printing (or making a PDF file). This means that objects (photos, digitially-originated images, graphics generated in InDesign) that are in the CMYK color space will not be modified at all when you print to a CMYK device. Meanwhile, graphics, photos, and objects generated in InDesign in RGB, grayscale or Lab color space will be converted to the CMYK space at print time.

This week I am in the middle of a typical color project. It is a 72-page booklet, published annually, that includes legacy photos (already in CMYK) and new photos in RGB (each has an embedded RGB camera profile).

The booklet was printed in another county for many years; now it’s here. I am acting as middleman-trouble-maker, help...Read More

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In the process of reading 130 student essays about new technologies in the graphic arts, I learned that U.S. currency has a number of new protections against counterfeiting, that chocolate can be printed with an ink-jet printer (so can the foam on your lattè), and that the Amazon Kindle will soon overtake the printed book.


Kindle is Amazon’s hand-held e-book reader, a device that can carry hundreds – thousands – of books, and make them available for your on-screen reading pleasure. The adv...Read More

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From time to time I hear a person say that the differences between Macintosh and Windows computers are becoming moot. They’re the same thing, some folks say. Well, they may be very similar, but there are still some very important differences.


One of them is Time Machine, Apple’s back-up software. It is so delightfully well-engineered that they deserve a medal. Time Machine comes with the latest Apple operating System OS 10.5. When you invoke Time Machine, the computer starts to back-up your files on a hard drive of your choice. I have a 1 TB external drive that I purchased to act as my back-up drive. It takes several days for Time Machine to catch up with you, but when it’s done, it just keeps working, writing back-ups of everything you ...Read More

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I’m getting ready to run a Hexachrome job on Cal Poly’s Heidelberg CD74 press. Hexachrome presumes six units. We have four, so we’ll have to run it through the press twice.

We have the ink on-hand, fresh soy-based Hexachrome colors ready for the job. And we have a lovely image – a painting by California fine artist Annie Armstrong, ready to go.

I don’t want anything on this project to be generic, so we are starting from scratch. New blankets, a freshly-cleaned press (since we’re running colors on units we normally use for process color, we’re going to wash it up extra-carefully to prevent contamination from any residual ink), and a new work flow.

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Excuse my persistence on this one, but I want to do a bit of follow-up on the What the Font application for the iPhone (it worked well in my lab tests). I have been out socializing – lunch with a friend, attending graduation ceremonies and taking my wife to Starbucks for a late-night coffee.

And, in each case I used the What the Font app on my iPhone in “real-life” settings to test its ability to determine a type face from various situations.


I photographed the menu at the Natural Café in San Luis Obispo, an...Read More

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I have written about MyFonts.com’s online What the Font program before, giving it high marks for cleverness and accuracy.

The company has now created a version of that program as a free stand-alone app for the iPhone, and it’s very good.


As with the online version, the program works by scanning or taking a digital photo of a text sample, and then sending that photo to MyFonts’ web site where it is analyzed against their massive database of type fonts. The online version is uncanny in its ability to ID fonts this way.

A friend of mine who...Read More

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The modern world provides solutions and assistance to humans never seen before….*

It’s Finals Week. I have taken a few days off from blogging so that I could grade 130 student essays on new technologies in the graphic communication industry. It has been enlightening, frustrating, amusing, and sometimes hilarious.

Though I encourage students to write about technologies new to the industry, I don’t limit the subjects on which they can write. As a result, I have received more than my share of research papers on Chocolography (it’s a system for printing on chocolate with a modified ink-jet printer), anti-counterfeiting measures instituted by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (color-shifting ink, embedded metal fibers, mag-stripes, and microprinting on currency) and a few really good papers on subjects that are new to me.

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