Can Someone Define These Terms for Me Please??

[jtlaurie]

I'm new to an advertising agency and would love it if someone could explain to me what these terms mean. Thanks!

1) Keylining
2) Die Line
3) Off Set Printing
4) Spot Printing
5) Mechanicals

[Kool]

1) Keylining - Thin lines that indicate the borbers of a photograph. Keyline do not print

2) Die Line - Lines that indicate where the finished product will be cut into it's final shape. A metal die is made from the lines and is used to cut custom shapes.

3) Off Set Printing - The most common form of printing using a printing press. The inked image is transfered from a metal plate to a rubber blanket and then from the blanket to the paper.

4) Spot Printing - Printing with 1 or more specific colors based on the Pantone Matching System as opposed to 4 color process printing which uses a combination of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Black to reproduce a wide range of colors.

5) Mechanicals - I don't know

I love children but I don't think I could eat a whole one.

[PrintDriver]

Mechanicals?

Those are layouts. Old term for ruby and wax. edit: with transparency overlays
Now they are computer layouts. edit: with multiple layers for cut paths and fabrication notes - for us anyway.

Gotta be careful when a designer says they are providing mechanicals instead of camera ready layouts (though they can sometimes mean the same thing).
Means you got your work cut out for you. LOL!

PrintDriver is a grande format digital print dude. His advice/opinions may not apply to the 4color/offset/web world of printing

Post Edited (PrintDriver) : 11/18/2004 1:36:28 AM GMT

[jtlaurie]

Can you be more specific with Keylining? Why does it take so long and exactly what does it entail? Is it putting lines on a print ad so the printer knows where to cut it? Is it retouching the ad, changing the brightness and colors??? Not sure why it takes a week for our designers to "keyline", whatever it means. Thanks!

[Kool]

It's another mostly obsolete term from the days of manual paste-up. I had to look a bit to find a real definition suince I haven't heard that term for many years.

KEYLINES
Black and white artwork which has been output and pasted into position on a sheet with 'key' identity 'lines' indicating the position of trims, drill holes, folds, scores, and die-cuts.

It's a purely pre-press function and mostly automatic now days. I have no idea why it takes your 'Designers' a week to do this. What kind of publcation are you talking about?

DZ, Don't newspapers still use these terms?

I love children but I don't think I could eat a whole one.

[D-Zine]

Kool - Keylining I never heard before.....but I think that's bc I joined the newspaper and the ass end of the cut and paste days....what they were psating up when I joined was the ads printed out from the laser printer and they shot from that. All the other terms I know and have used.

Eeekkkk - getting mechanicals and camera ready work mixed....LOL! ROFL @ PDs comment!!

Boobie Island or Bust!

[defjoe]

what puzzles me is how you got this positionm and not knowing what most of these mean...especially spot and offset printing.

'I will become the most powerful Jedi ever!'
'I'm the damn designer, bitches!'

Check out my indie comic book!
www.assassinsguild.net/ (http://www.assassinsguild.net/)

[jtlaurie]

because i'm on the account side

[imagemaker]

I thought I was the only one still around who know all those 'conventional' terms. I've been in graphics over 25 years now and well recall the days of Exacto knives, Rapidographs, parallel rules and t-squares. Even have the scars to prove it! (More so than anything else, one wasn’t ‘initiated’ until they’d lost a couple grams of finger to a blade.) By the time you ordered type from a type house, and camera work from a repro house, sometimes I did take a few days to get a simple ad done.

What used to take a week to produce, we now do in a day. What used to be a combined effort between a trained designer, skilled typographer (not merely a typist), a technically trained camera operator, two technically trained processor operators, two delivery drivers (one from each shop), a receptionist and a ‘paste-up’ or ‘keyline’ artist each of us now do alone.

You’re not feeling pressured at all, are you?

Anyway-that’s production if not progress.

Welcome to the exciting world of Graphic Design!

--Ciao for Niao--
'Imagemaker'
aka Ethan
www.amug.org/~pathways/ImagesIconsIdeas

--Ciao for Niao--

Ethan

[PrintDriver]

It can take a week to layout ads even with a computer. Ask D-Zine.
We all don't just push a button and catch it on the other end.

I don't mind when 'mechanicals' means camera ready.
It's when 'mechanicals' means, 'here's a file with all images FPO (you gotta replace them with Hi-res scans), and those images require silhouetting, fading, retouching, or worse. Oh, and on this hard copy I drew where I want you to place the cut path, I couldn't make the pen tool work. And there's layers in the file that show where the spot mount photos go. You have to use those layers to print the spot mount photos (should be in separate file). Oh and wait, color matching.....!',
that I cringe.
Typical day.

LOL @ Joe. I thought the exact same thing until the person's second post. Then I knew it had to be an 'out of department' question.
;)

PrintDriver is a grande format digital print dude. His advice/opinions may not apply to the 4color/offset/web world of printing

Post Edited (PrintDriver) : 11/18/2004 12:22:33 PM GMT

[D-Zine]

ROFL @ '.....I couldn't make the pen tool work!!' haaaa haha!!

I don't know about others but when I was in college, even tho most businesses were using computers to do everything, I still had to learn AND DO things for projects the old way of doing everything BEFORE I learned how we do it now, so that I had a better understanding. Why aren't other colleges doing this?? Pfffft!!

and Yep.....PDs right..it CAN take up to a week to layout ads...I mean you do the ad, send off for a proof, get changes, send off proof again....get more changes that weren't even marked on the first proof you got back, then they want something totally different and a different size, why not..lol...and you wanna tell em to shove it up there bum...etc etc...it's goes on and on.

:o)

Boobie Island or Bust!

[Kink]

D-Zine... I also was tought the ins and outs of the 'old style' with the PMT (I think) camera, the typeogrophy all done by hand.. actually we learned more about that stuff rather than computer programs... I pretty much learned all the programs I needed myself.
THey tought stuff like 'Pagemaker' aka, Ragemaker. What good is that... and it was on a Mac, what what wrong with quark? I have a lot of beefs about what I was tought in school...

Don't dunk the cat in the water!

[D-Zine]

I learned alot in school and was pretty well rounded in the old and newer ways, not really any beefs with SCAD, but you never learn anything like what you learn in the real world for sure!! Experience is the best schooling anyone can have!

Boobie Island or Bust!

[Patrick Shannon]

>and Yep.....PDs right..it CAN take up to a week to layout ads...I mean you do the ad,
>send off for a proof, get changes, send off proof again....get more changes that weren't
>even marked on the first proof you got back, then they want something totally different
>and a different size, why not..lol...and you wanna tell em to shove it up there bum...etc etc...
>it's goes on and on.

OH, so true. But one more thing applies to my case, add on 'Boss yells at you and asks 'Is there a reason why we can't get this right?'' at the end of that description.

--
Patrick Shannon

http://www.mywarwithculture.com/images/mwwc_sm.gif
My War With Culture (http://www.mywarwithculture.com)
The Positively Eclectic Online Comic!

[PrintDriver]

Quark was probably too expensive for the school to buy all the seat licenses it needed. It wasn't until last month that Quark offered an educational discount. Adobe has always been easy to work with as far as licensing. Too bad InD didn't take off until just 2 years ago. Pagemaker was probably all your school could budget.

PrintDriver is a grande format digital print dude. His advice/opinions may not apply to the 4color/offset/web world of printing

[D-Zine]

hahhaha! LOL! @ Pat!

Whew..I am pretty damn lucky in the boss department for the most part. He stays outta my way unless he is coming in to tell some silly joke or something.

Boobie Island or Bust!

[defjoe]

my internship was for a graphic studio that was all mechanicals. taught me a ton!

'I will become the most powerful Jedi ever!'
'I'm the damn designer, bitches!'

Check out my indie comic book!
www.assassinsguild.net/ (http://www.assassinsguild.net/)

[Patrick Shannon]

(In best Ren voice from Ren and Stimpy) 'I'd like to hear a silly joke from my boss once in a while....'

Only thing I ever hear from mein fuhrer is when I make a mistake (often easily correctable) on one job out of fifty. Damn good record for a solitary GD putting up with walk-in/recreation jobs right and left. Don't think I ever heard a compliment on anything I've ever done...

--
Patrick Shannon

http://www.mywarwithculture.com/images/mwwc_sm.gif
My War With Culture (http://www.mywarwithculture.com)
The Positively Eclectic Online Comic!

[imagemaker]

I worked for a fellow who was such a great salesman that he could convince one potential customer that, 'He told you that! He doesn’t know what he’s talking about! I hired him because I felt sorry for him.' and convince the next walk-in, 'He’s the professional. I hired him because he’s the best. If he says that’s what you should do, then that’s the way to go.'

Building conventional art for offset spot and process printing and silk screening, one really learns WHY such things like traps are needed, not just that you make them. There were a myriad of techniques for simple things like how you hold your knife, and the angle of your pen against the ruler. The same could be said about the numerous ‘paths’ we can use to accomplish the same thing, via mouse click, keyboard command, let alone all the different ways to use the tools.

But even then, with the advancing technology in printing, some of the old necessities for negs and plates will become obsolete.

The only thing constant is change. And ‘The spinnin’ don’t stop when you leave the cradle- and it certainly doesn’t slow down any, either.

Later.

--Ciao for Niao--

Ethan

[Jeff Fisher LogoMotives]

A couple great resources for an account side person to be able to communicate with the design and production side:

Pocket Pal (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0883623382/qid=1100880480/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/104-2674477-9665533)

Graphically Speaking: A visual lexicon for achieving better designer-client communication (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1581802919/qid=1100880650/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/104-2674477-9665533)

- Jeff

:: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Jeff Fisher :: Engineer of Creative Identity
Jeff Fisher LogoMotives (http://www.jfisherlogomotives.com)

:: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Member - HOW Magazine Editorial Advisory Board :: HOW Design Conference Advisory Board

Author - 'The Savvy Designer's Guide to Success: Ideas and tactics for a killer career' - to be released by HOW Design Books in December 2004.

:: :: :: :: :: :: ::

[Kool]

Damn Jeff, you are a virtual cornucopia of design links & info. /emoticons/biggrin.gif

I love children but I don't think I could eat a whole one.

[PrintDriver]

Wow, they still print the Pocket Pal?
I should update mine.
Mine describes a computer network as a MainFrame with Terminals.

PrintDriver is a grande format digital print dude. His advice/opinions may not apply to the 4color/offset/web world of printing

[D-Zine]

LOL @ Kool! No kidding..he is right tho! You are very resourceful Jeff!

Boobie Island or Bust!