Glyphs: A New Tool For Type Design

Posted on November 19, 2010 by aharris

I am not a type designer. Like pretty much everyone else in the world, I lack the time, patience, and skill to design an entire font and I probably always will.

Glyphs uses familiar bezier curves for line control.

Even though I’m not going to produce the next Helvetica, I have found that type design software is still a useful tool to have in the box and here’s why:

Logotype.

Sometimes you want to make modifications to an existing font or build unique characters when designing a new logo or setting other display text.

The FedEx logo is a great example of this – the right-pointing arrow implied by the negative space between E and x was achieved by designing a custom typeface based on Univers and Futura.

Although FedEx had the budget to commission an entire face from a respected foundry and also required many variations to accommodate numerous brands and departments, the word FedEx is is only five characters – you could just draw it in Illustrator.

The problem with drawing letterforms is that you lose out on all of the slick geometry and text effects available in the Adobe Creative Suite.

It is just extremely convenient to maintain live type in application software and will generally produce sharper, more precise text in print – especially when trapping text to another color or using a knockout effect.

The Glyphs application for Mac, written by German developer Georg Seifert, is currently in public beta and is available for download at glyphsapp.com (or schriftgestaltung.de for those of you who sprechen Deutsch).

Some of the earlier builds used to construct the Ross logotype were a little buggy when it came to undo and other handy functions, but more recent builds have stabilized considerably and I highly recommend spending the half day or so it takes to become familiar with the basics of this very useful tool.

If you find drawing from scratch in Glyphs to be overly complicated and not worth the effort, just draw your vectors in Illustrator, copy’n'paste straight into a character in Glphys, and export an OpenType file.

This extra step to roundtrip your custom lettering into an .otf will definitely pay off if you intend to use it in more than one project.

Native PDF Workflow

Posted on November 2, 2010 by aharris

PDF is nothing new. We’ve all been using it for years. So you might be asking yourself what the big deal is and wondering if you should care. Here’s what is new:

Like all shops, we used to flatten PDF artwork and distill it into PostScript or another proprietary format for imposition, trapping, screening, and the rest of the file prep process.

Entrance diagram of a fully APPE2-compliant RIP

We are now able to step all the way through prepress to final proof or plate rasters without flattening and without moving the artwork out of the PDF format. We have been testing and refining our PDF workflow for more than a year and are now processing 100% of our work this way.

So, do you care? Should you care?

In all honesty you are unlikely to see a direct impact. In fact, one of the goals of our testing was to achieve output parity between our PDF workflow and our traditional, tried-and-true raster workflow.

The fringe benefit is speed, accuracy, and the ability to be more responsive to last-minute changes — not that you would ever be making any late revisions!

This update to the latest Adobe PDF Print Engine also means we continue to support new transparency blend modes and other complex effects as they are made available in Adobe Creative Suite products.

Also, any late-stage changes made by us on your behalf can now be pushed back upstream for pickup work in the future.

We hope that you will appreciate, but continue to not really notice, some of these new changes we’ve made behind the scenes.

Meet Peggy Finta

Posted on September 29, 2010 by aharris

Happy birthday, Peggy.

Peggy Finta is the primary point of contact for many of our pharmaceutical accounts here at Ross. She makes sure that every stage of a project goes exactly according to plan — and we do mean exactly. She is also in charge of accounts receivable, so you’d better make a point to stay on her good side.

It’s hard to believe but Peggy joined the company in 1980. That’s 30 years for those of you keeping track!

Thanks from all of us for all your hard work and for continuing to keep us in line. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you.

Letterpress Dies Available Online

Posted on September 28, 2010 by aharris

The next time you quote a pocket folder or other die cut project, take a look at our list of standing dies.

Chuck Barker on the Thompson letterpress.

Using a die off the shelf will save the cost of tooling a custom die and also mean we can get on press sooner.

Just place the PDF in your layout application (ok, InDesign) and build your artwork accordingly.

If you have any questions about using our digital dielines you can post here or contact us.

Making a Mark

Posted on September 27, 2010 by aharris

We’ve been around a long time. Sometimes you need to make a change in order to feel like you’re moving forward and evolving as an organization.

As we gathered our thoughts here and began to work on some updated branding, we focused in on a couple of guiding principles that seemed important.

Just one color.

Establish a visual language. Our goal was to create a mark that clearly speaks to our work as printers. The halftone concept we hope is familiar to those of you who have worked in or around printing for a while. (Actually, we refer to this as “the quartertone mark”, since it is 1/4 of a larger halftone-like pattern.) We wanted something that contains identifiable characteristics suitable for use in additional design elements (repeating dots, square shape, spectral vignette). We also need our logo to reproduce well in all production contexts, for example: one color, reversed color, or blind stamped.

Refresh, don’t reinvent. Secondly, we wanted to make a natural progression from our existing identity. So we decided to borrow from the previous typeface and we also maintained the use of a CMYK color spectrum as an additional reference to familiar printing techniques.

We hope that we succeeded in at least some of our original goals and would welcome your feedback on our efforts.