Commercial costings

I contacted a number of printers regarding my packaging and my 16 page booklet. Most of which never responded after hearing I was a student. I did however, get a quote from 'Swift Print' in Huddersfield. They took the time to look through a mock up I created and gave me a quote based on the details I supplied.

They said I could have had a cheaper quote but the spot colours I wanted drove up the cost. Unfortunately they couldn't help me with the packaging as they only deal in digital printing and lithography. Nevertheless, I scanned the quote I got and have uploaded it here. I supplied with details of inks, and substrate I wanted to use and they got back to me within a couple of days.

Printing processes and stock clarification for 'Good' brief

I have researched into the ways that my packaging and the contents could be printed commercially and what is available to me and what limits I may face if I was to produce this for a client.

The main gift box, I presumed would be printed using lithography due to the small print run I would expect from an introductory product of this kind. However, I soon found that flexography would be more beneficial to me, not only because it can print more but flexo was invented to print packaging. After talking to the tutors and doing some online research I decided I would also get a better print due to the spot varnish I wanted to use, which would be gloss.

The second print process I am using is offset litho for the distribution stickers and also for the gift tag which goes inside the box. The thermochromic band will also be litho printed. The tag and band would be sheet-fed and the stickers most probably web-fed.

Print finishing

I decided to look at print finishes and what would best suit my product. As I've read and no doubt discussed before is the importance of print finishes, and they should not become an afterthought to make something look more disirable alone. They should be used intelligently and should provide a link a to the concept.

This is when I thought about the posibility of using a heat sensitive ink that would change when touched. Thermochromic ink is a high sensitive ink used on that can be used on a variety of substrates from paper to fabric. I want to encourage interactivity by using a thermochromic based ink which will feature on the outer packaging in some way.

These are examples of the use of thermochromic ink used in graphic design. It gives a unique effect that you don't see around that often anymore. As a kid, I had t-shirts with this ink on and I certainly found it interesting. It could be a case of high cost and durability that comes into question.

Patterned packaging

I've been searching for a good example of patterns on packaging, and this seems like a good one. This links to my packaging development in which I want to create a pattern and apply it to the box in the form of a spot varnish which will offset against the black box to give an extra gloss finish in certain areas.

Patterns like this are usually found on high quality products such as designer brands and I hope that some of that quality might be reflected in my resolution.

This packaging was created for Louis Vuitton by BETC Design

French studio BETC Design's redesigned Louis Vuitton City Guides pair vibrant colors with distinctive brown. The guides' new design references Louis Vuitton's long heritage of travel luxury, echoing the vintage luggage labels that bellboys once affixed to travelers' trunks. The distinctive Louis Vuitton brown is definitely present, but the redesign adds bright, modern splashes of color to each guide, color coded for each destination city. An additional product shot is viewable on the source site.

Front cover magazine inspiration

This was a blog post from last year that I have unearthed because I wanted to use the graphical style on my front cover for the 16 page booklet.

Just watched 'Yes Man' today starring Jim Carrey. I am not going to discuss the movie because it is kind of irrelevant but Jim Carrey, in my opinion, is a real funny guy. What I noticed the most was the movie ending and especially the credits. They looked so cool, and I had to see who was responsible for them.



Imaginary Forces were the team behind the titles for this movie and others like Minority Report, Transformers and The Number 23 to name a few. These titles are not riddled with 3D nor special effects. I love simplicity and this is simplicity in the form of t.v graphics.


I just love everything about it. It sums up everything I like about design in terms of creativity using colour and typography. I sound a little stupid sometimes because I am not quite sure what to say. I like it because its pleasing to the eye. It flows well and its composition is great. It does not have a huge in depth meaning or concept, it just is what it is, and what it is, is awesome.

Magazine Layout Design: Behance Network

I am always wary of looking at websites for inspiration like DeviantART, and flickr groups just because you don't know who's designed them, what they have used to design them and if they are hitting the right audience, using the correct typography to get across their message and most importantly when designing for a magazine that they are using a grid system correctly.

The Behance Network seems to be a little different from the websites I mentioned above. The examples I have posted here do seem quite professional. The website itself promotes designers portfolio and seems to attract more professional work than somewhere like DeviantART. I trawled through the editorial section and found some really nice examples, and now I know more about grid systems I can break down examples and hazard a guess at how many columns were used, calculate the gutter and margins approximately and generally see what is and what is not working.

I have loads of examples that I have taken inspiration from for my own ideas and also looked at how space is used with a varying amount of copy on a page.

From strict 3 column grid layouts, with a varied head and foot margins









To freeflowing less structured text using thick margins and a single column style for less body copy













From neutral colours and 2 column grid with identical gutter and inner and outer margin widths









To expressive colour, and incorporated imagery which overlaps pages to mask the centre fold.











And finally more visually driven layouts with what looks like originated from a two column grid
and has been rotated 45 degrees for impact.










More examples...

Giftboxes & Chocolate

The idea that everyone liked during my crit was the one surrounding chocolate box packaging for music. I have now concentrated my focus onto this idea and now I am looking at inspiration and analysing the design market for packaging that I could take ideas from.

I decided to search online for quick inspiration and found that type design and brand identities prevail. In terms of typography I have found that most boxes feature cursive or handwritten typefaces as well as a selection of simple sans and sans serif fonts. Colour is a little less easy to define but white and black seem to be the majority vote. The reason for the neutral colour choices seem to be used for a unisex market.

I realise I have only scratched the surface of this market, and I plan to look at buying figures, trends and also look at gender. There is a good deal print processes being used in the market too which appeal to me. Foil block and die cutting add aesthetic appeal and also give a luxurious feel that I am looking for.

I purposely picked examples of luxury gift boxes because that is what my idea is based on. Making the CD format seem more appealing. I don't want to make it obvious for anyone receiving a CD to know it's a CD straight away. The not knowing could raise expectation and create a buzz around the gift.

The handwritten type gives the box a personal quality as well as a luxurious edge. It assures the receiver that care has been taken, its like a signature of approval. The foil stamping suggests wealth and luxury also. The sans serif type examples appeal to me more just because it gives much more of a contemporary feel, and does not lose character, as I would have expected. Before searching I was playing around with serif typefaces but now I know it works like these examples do, I can broaden my search and include some sans serifs typefaces.

Here are my examples

Packaging for Chocolate

Since my change of direction I wanted to get off to a flyer on my style of packaging seen as I have got long left until the dreaded deadline. I have a vision that my packaging is to be luxurious due to the nature of my concept. I want people to interact with my product and the packaging is part of that product, so the stock and the style design has to feel right.

I went straight to thedieline.com, which is a brilliant resource for inspirational packaging. I then went ahead and searched for chocolate packaging and picked out a few examples.

The first two examples are for Co Couture who produced hand-made chocolates. Before looking at examples I thought about using serif typefaces but seeing this example has altered my opinion that serif typefaces add quality and sophistication. I think this typesetting can be just as effective. I particularly like the use of a darker stock and the dark foil blocking. These examples were designed by Sort Design. Simplicity does appeal to me when executed properly and this could be an approach I could use for my outer packaging.


This packaging for Antoine Amrani Chocolates has that same feel of quality and fantastic execution with an injection of colour that lifts the whole thing. The logo sits wonderfully on the front of the box and the belly band adds a nice touch and helps the rest of the green to tie in. The materials are of a high quality and so the design benefits from this. Again, the type is not predominantly serif based. This was designed by smith design. (I know such a creative name for an agency)

Moving on to bars of chocolate, and Ruth Pearson has designed this typographic based packaging. I like the way she has used the space effectively and the so the text flows all the way to the bottom of the bar. I am not so keen on the typeface though. It seems a little too Art Nouveau.

More nails in the downloaded music coffin.

I am still searching for reasons as to why I should persuade people to buy CD's rather than download music. I initially was going to test the sound quality between the two formats myself. However, I found this article online which gives me the answers I wanted.

The CD format in terms of sound quality is still superior to download.

Audio

For the benefit of anyone laboring under the delusion that Apple's MPEG-4 AAC audio is "near CD quality", here's a quick comparison.

Update 2003-07-16

I re-encoded the iTunes and AAC files using QuickTime 6.3, after someone suggested that 6.1 and 6.2 had been full of bugs from having been rushed out of the door too quickly.

Indeed, QuickTime 6.3 does improve the AAC quality--enough that if you encoded anything with 6.1 and 6.2, I'd strongly suggest re-encoding with 6.3.

However, to my ears at least, LAME MP3 retains a slight edge over AAC at 160kbps, and is clearly superior at 128kbps.

MPEG-4 AAC vs MP3 vs Ogg

With the launch of Apple's online music store and new iPods, a lot of people have bought into the hype that AAC at 128kbps is "near CD quality" and "better than MP3". I decided to try a few tests of my own instead.

First, I ripped the hit track "Emerge" by media darlings Fischerspooner from CD to AIFF using iTunes. From this, I took a preview-length slice from around 38 seconds into the track, so I hopefully wouldn't be accused of copyright violation. Remember, I'm doing this for the academic purpose of comparing the merits of different audio encoding algorithms, something which I believe falls under "fair use" copyright provisions.

I chose the Fischerspooner track for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's reasonably representative of the kind of music I like to listen to--electronica, with stereo and phasing effects and lots of pure waveforms. Secondly, I had noticed before that it doesn't compress very easily--square and triangle waves require an infinite fourier series to represent exactly, so analog synth sounds (even if produced by digital software, as in this case) are hard to compress to MP3.

So, next I encoded to MP3 using both iTunes and LAME; with iTunes I used the best VBR setting, with LAME I tried both --alt-preset standard (which attempts to achieve CD quality) and --abr 128 (for a fair comparison with MPEG-4 AAC as sold on the Apple Music site).

After that, I encoded to MPEG-4 AAC 128kbps using the "enhanced" QuickTime 6.3 AAC encoder and iTunes.

Finally, I encoded to Ogg Vorbis using the Vorbis QuickTime component and an average bitrate of 128kbps, then again at quality 5. I picked quality 5 because my previous testing had indicated that that was about the lowest quality Ogg encoding I couldn't tell from CD audio.

The website has samples that you can listen too that will prove the quality of sound is worse on an tunes aac file

Listening

I auditioned the sample files using Sennheiser HD445 headphones plugged straight into an iBook and a flat panel iMac. Testing two different Macs makes me pretty sure it's not a matter of faulty hardware, and note that I didn't use a "golden ears" high-end audio system--just a decent pair of headphones on a regular Mac.

The results are quite clear to my ears. For the 128kbps files, the LAME-encoded MP3 is the closest to the original, followed closely by the Ogg Vorbis file. The AAC file is truly awful.

I was rather surprised at this, as Vorbis is supposed to be better than MP3. I was also shocked by how bad the AAC file was.

Allowing 160kbps, Ogg Vorbis seems to overtake LAME MP3, in that it requires slightly fewer kbps to achieve a result that isn't glaringly different from the original CD. Both are better than the best iTunes can manage in MP3. AAC at 160kbps is slightly worse than LAME MP3 160kbps, but it's a close thing.

Conclusions

If you care about audio quality and listen to a lot of electronic music, avoid MPEG-4 AAC, particularly if you use bit rates below 160kbps. iTunes MP3 at 160kbps is better than AAC at 128kbps if you can afford the extra file size. If you really want CD quality, you'll need to use Ogg Vorbis or LAME MP3 encoding.

If encoding speed or iPod compatibility is important to you, use AAC--but don't go below 160kbps.

I am disappointed that yet again, Apple revved the iPod but didn't bother to implement Vorbis decode. I won't be buying one.

The standard filetype for itunes is 128kbps aac file. They sell this type of file due to the file size. Anyone that doesn't know about audio, like me before carrying out this research wouldn't know they are buying a poorer quality of music

Music Packaging: Reversing the Trend

Who says that hard format is a thing of the past? This lovely ACDC collectors box set is the ultimate example of the importance of print media to CD packaging. This was designed by Smay Design and took two years to design and produce. This example shows a commitment to the cause and something that could never be replicated online.










From thedieline.com

"The exterior box is designed to resemble a vintage AC/DC guitar amp – complete with the original logo that was spray-painted onto the rear of Angus and Malcolm’s speaker cabinets in 1975. The “head” of the amp has a handle that lifts the top off to reveal the contents housed within. Oh yeah, the head is also a WORKING GUITAR AMPLIFIER! That’s right, one watt of pure AC/DC makes this box a truly unique collector’s item. You can PLAY the box set while LISTENING TO the box set! Check out the videos of Angus using the amp.

The box, which includes 3 CDs and 2 DVDs of ACDC rare tracks, recordings and videos, also includes a 12" LP, numerous memorabilia reproductions as well as a 164-page hard bound book containing rare and unseen photos spanning 1974-2009 plus full-size re-prints of original press releases, tour itineraries, tour books, test pressing labels, advertisements and much more. A real history of the band from the inside out. Rare photography includes never-before-seen shots of the band recording at the Albert Music studio on King Street in Sydney with legendary producers Harry Vanda and George Young in 1977. Also tons of unpublished live shots from all over the world."

The importance of print

Found an article mostly on marketing but I thought it fitted with my are of focus which is print based media. In the article the author creates a list of advantages to print based media over online technology. Because I am trying to persuade downloaders to buy music in physical format this seems quite relevant to my research.

To summarise, the advantages of print marketing:
• A more “hands on” tactile form of marketing
• A personable option which can be delivered direct to the decision makers hand
• A marketing choice unreliant on technology, allowing prospects to enjoy away from the screen
when they are in a relaxed state of mind and perhaps more receptive to the message
• Something different
• You can control where your literature is placed as well as who gets it
• It is often suggested that print has an innate sense of credibility and has a higher degree of
believability attached to it
• The advances in digital printing make short print runs and personalised concepts an
economical solution.

Downloads VS Hardcopy

I decided to do a bit of maths because I found that the average price of a album download on itunes was 7.99 and to buy the album in a shop or supermarket would be 8.99. A few of the downloaded albums now come with digital artwork which is ok for screen and I presume you can print it off if you like.

After finding that I went on to calculate how much it would cost you to print out the CD cover, booklet, and reverse cover. So I found out how many pages on average my printer cartridges would print and how much paper I would need. The results showed that it would cost approximately £2.68 to print one lot of artwork and have the music files burnt to CD. This not only costs £1.69 more than the hard copy, the quality can never be as good.

My calculations are shown below.
Printing
Each cartridge 370 pages
£8 each
6 inks
Total = £44
Source HP.com

Paper
120gsm matte paper 50 sheets
£5.99
£12 = 100
£24 = 200
£36= 300
£42= 350
£45= 375
Source Whsmith
£44 + £45= £89

Average amout of pages for artwork= 10
37 albums from one cartridge
£89/37= 2.4056723463
£2.40 approx per album

Blank media
25cd-r’s= £7
37= £10.50
28p per disc
To burn to CD and print the album artwork would cost
Approximately £2.68

Now obviously not everyone will print artwork but the extra £1 for a physical copy of an album that does exactly the same as a download is surely worth it...

magazine Layout

I decided that the best way to tackle this brief was to take a look at examples that were already out there in regards to layout for my 16 page document. I want to be able to use layout in a creative way rather than systematically going through each process and explaining it and having an image of what I was talking about in a really uniform way. I want every DPS to jump off the page and take a different approach, and I felt a magazine style would fit the bill.



I want use type creatively but also sparingly, so I don't want massive paragraphs of text to dominate my layout. Here I have photographed a few examples of layout which I found in Computer Arts. This is a few years old but it was the only copy I had. I am going to get examples of more contemporary issues when I come to design my layout after deciding on my topics of discussion and before I start to form grids to work with from my layout sketches.































I will also be looking over last years work with regards to type and grid as there is no use ignoring it and searching for new examples when I have prior experience. Here are examples of what I did last year. I want move away from using a lot of copy and do something much more visual and direct.


I have old design sheets that I will use as a template too.

For Print Only

I found this brilliant website today which is dedicated to print production. It profiles jobs and gives a preview of the work, shows the quantity, cost of production, what colours and what varnishes were used as well as the method.

This kind of information is crucial to this module as it is a pretty good indicator of how much a similar job would cost me to print, so it gives me a general idea without getting a shock. It can also be used to point me in the right direction in terms of what stock to use and what print finishes work well with certain substrates.

Only problem is it is american based but you can just use a currency converter to get an idea of what the cost was, so happy days. I will be definitely checking this website out in future.

Computer Arts Projects - Printing Tips

The Printers eye view article displayed here outlines the 13 most common pitfalls when submitting artwork for print.

I won't go through everyone but ones I thought might need explaining are:

Imposition: This refers to printing multiples and Rik Penny says "Don't impose jobs yourself as all printers should have imposition software and different ways of approaching the task." This is particularly important when trimming a print job as different printers are set up in various ways.

Spreads: Penny states that a job should never be supplied to printers in spreads as the reprographics dept will have a nightmare trying to split the pdf files into single page documents ready to impose them. Spreads are fine for clients but not for printers.

Inner Margins: When printing a perfect bound book it is vitally important to leave a big enough inner margin otherwise the text will read into the gutter and force the reader to bend the spine back, thus breaking the glue and result in the book falling apart. 15-20mm is the reccommended margin width

Outer Margins: When printing large saddle stitched documents it is important to note that the middle sections will trim shorter than the outer pages. You'll need to plan your designs accordingly and either leave a big enough margin width so as not to impose on the content or offset pages during imposition.

Cutter Guides: These should be created and supplied as an illustrator file due to the fact that printers use computer controlled routers, which can only use vector artwork, not bitmaps. Set them up as a spot colour and label them 'cutter' and set them to overprint.

Saddle stitch binding: When designing a document that will be saddle stitch bound it is important that the pages are dividle by four as 8, 12, 16, 20 and so on. It is impossible to achieve this without it.

Roll fold: Roll folding relates to folding pages and accounting for shorter pages as a result of folding. When designing a an a4 document for example always make the first page the size of the document and then decrease the page by 1mm in succession.

Computer Arts Projects - Designers Toolkit

This is another great article outlining what is available to print designers in terms of inks, stocks, and finishes. This kind of info enables me to identify techniques I might like to use for my 16 page print document and so I can dig deeper to find out more about the techniques suited to my development.

I realise that I won't be able to use these techniques on my document but I will not limit myself because of that, as I can document where things would go and how I would going about adopting the right technique for the job.

The article explains that decisions have to be made and they can be crucial to the success or downfall of a piece of work. For example if you were to produce a document for a company with an ethical reputation, then an uncoated stock would give an organic feel to the print. Using a coated substrate or spot varnish may damage that reputation as the finish would be too flashy.

My interest lies in thermochromic ink. I want to try and find a use for it.