Throughout our days we are exposed to myriad advertising and marketing messages encouraging us to give our attention (or more importantly our money or time) to certain businesses, websites, or people. These messages can be as simple as an email notifying us of a sale at our favorite clothing store, or a text message informing us of a daily lunch deal at our favorite restaurant.
But what if a favorite store notifies us in an email about a really good sale on a certain day, and then right before the sale, sends us a postcard with a coupon reminding us about it. Then on that sale day, a text message comes to our phones reminding us again about the event, keeping the sale in the forefront of our minds. Wouldn't it be more likely that we'd stop by that store?
The example above is a cross-media marketing campaign and is one of the marketing offerings from Lorraine Press. These campaigns are proven to have good results, especially over marketing campaigns using only one media outlet.
Marketers have reported an average improvement of 35% for cross-media campaigns. If personalization is added to that cross-media campaign, the average improvement is closer to 50% over a static print-only campaign. Source
Cross-media campaigns can be targeted to a specific demographic, and then personalized further for each recipient. They use more than one medium to invoke a response from the audience, and they are aimed at motivating the recipient to an action. Because of how these campaigns are designed, they have results that are trackable with detailed statistics, and measurable results. You will know who on your customer list responded and also who did not respond at all.
The media used can include any combination of personalized websites, text messages, email notifications, and even more traditional advertising message outlets such as printed pieces like postcards, and television or radio ads. Not every campaign has to contain every media outlet. Each one is specifically targeted to a certain audience and will use the media the audience is most likely to respond to.
For example, an email campaign can link to a personalized website that is designed with the recipient's favorite color. A direct mail postcard can be sent out reminding each person of that website which is personalized to include graphics designed to appeal to him or her, and also can direct potential customers to a coupon, or special offer either on the web, or at a store.
The trackable results can tell you which media your customers respond to the best, or what time of year they are more likely to purchase. The more data gathered by these campaigns, the more specific and targeted your marketing efforts can become, generating more and more success.
So, if you are in the market for enlarging your customer base, or you want to find out what form of advertising inspires your customers the most, contact us at Lorraine Press (info@lorrainepress[dot]com), and we can get you started with a cross media marketing campaign.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
"So long, and thanks for all the fish!"
Okay, so there weren't really all that many fish shared
(however, you can make a pretty good seviche!),
but how could I resist using that photo!
Thanks for making Prepress what it is today.
Wishing you all the best in your future endeavors!
Thursday, February 17, 2011
The envelope, please . . .
The moments breathlessly awaited by millions watching the Oscars just became a little more beautiful. The envelope containing the winners of the Oscar categories has been redesigned by Marc Friedland.
The envelopes used to be plain, white, and ordinary. But now they are iridescent gold paper with watermarks of images of Oscar, lined with red paper embossed with gold Oscars. The new envelopes are also designed to open easily to relieve our anticipation as quickly as possible. Here's the link to the news story.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Color Spaces Part 2
This is a continuation of the topic of Color Spaces started in the previous post.
(These recommendations are for images intending to print in CMYK.)
Along with your monitor and your printer, a photo has its own color space. It may fall completely inside both the RGB and CMYK color spaces, or it may be mostly within both spaces with only a few areas out of the CMYK gamut (like the sample photo below, also used in the previous post), or it may have large areas unavailable to a CMYK gamut. To refresh your memory, here is our sample photo with gamut warnings turned on in Photoshop.
If your photo is like ours, with very few areas of gamut warnings, it will probably look just fine in CMYK when it is converted from RGB to CMYK for print. You may want to tweak it a little, but it should look fine. Below is a comparison of our original sample image in RGB, the image with gamut warnings turned on in Photoshop, and the what the image looks like converted to CMYK. Not a lot of difference.
However, if your image has large areas covered in Photoshop's gamut warnings, you should make adjustments before you submit your image to print, otherwise you could be disappointed in the difference and you won't be in control of the effects of color conversion.
Most of the time the problem and its solution lie in the over-saturation of colors. So create an adjustment layer for Saturation in your image.
Then choose the channel in which the most warnings show (if it's in a grassy field, choose the green channel, if it's someone's red sweater, choose red, etc.)
Adjust the saturation down, until many or most or all of the gamut warnings disappear.
Another option is to create a Levels adjustment layer, and use that instead to adjust colors to remove some of the gamut warnings.
Minimizing these gamut warning areas now will minimize color shifts when your image is converted to a CMYK, or print, color space.
Before converting your image to CMYK, know what your Conversion Options are set to in your Color Settings menu. (Control + Shift + k to open the Color Settings menu in Photoshop)
Overall, we recommend that the "Intent" be set to "Relative Colormetric." For a detailed explanation of what these four rendering intents do, please visit this informative tutorial here.
This tutorial does a good job explaining the difference between Photoshop's four rendering intents: Perceptual, Saturation, Relative Colormetric, and Absolute Colormetric. And it will help you know when it's a good idea to use one of the other options besides Relative Colormetric.
(It's also a good idea to know what your other settings in the Color Settings menu are set to, as well, but we aren't covering that, right now.)
Now your conversion of an image from one color space to another will be less surprising, whether you convert your image in Photoshop, or you let your print provider do the conversion from RGB to CMYK in their workflow.
This is really all about control. If you know what is happening to your image's color space as you move from RGB to CMYK, you can better control how it looks. And you don't leave that control in the hands of others.
As you design your print projects, keep in mind the differences between the RGB and CMYK color spaces, or gamuts. Because they are different, what you see on your monitor will not necessarily represent what you see on paper, and what you print out on your inkjet or color laser printer does not necessarily represent what you will get from your print provider.
In fact, without any controls in place, it is a sure thing that they won't be the same.
Remember that each device has it's own color gamut. Each monitor, printer, and press will display or print your image slightly differently from your monitor, your printer, and your print provider's press.
This is one reason why the proofs that a print provider give to you are so important. The color proofs from your print provider should show what you can expect your images to look like when printed. Here at Lorraine Press we've put a lot of effort into making our color proofs an accurate reflection of what you will see on our presses at the press check.
Also, when working in cross-media marketing campaigns, knowing about color spaces and how they basically work can help as you choose colors that can look good for your projects in any medium — especially if you are using web and print in your campaigns.
Hopefully, if there are any readers still out there reading what has to be one of the longest blog posts I've ever written, this has helped introduce what color gamuts are and how they affect your projects.
Photoshop Gamut Warnings, continued
Along with your monitor and your printer, a photo has its own color space. It may fall completely inside both the RGB and CMYK color spaces, or it may be mostly within both spaces with only a few areas out of the CMYK gamut (like the sample photo below, also used in the previous post), or it may have large areas unavailable to a CMYK gamut. To refresh your memory, here is our sample photo with gamut warnings turned on in Photoshop.
If your photo is like ours, with very few areas of gamut warnings, it will probably look just fine in CMYK when it is converted from RGB to CMYK for print. You may want to tweak it a little, but it should look fine. Below is a comparison of our original sample image in RGB, the image with gamut warnings turned on in Photoshop, and the what the image looks like converted to CMYK. Not a lot of difference.
However, if your image has large areas covered in Photoshop's gamut warnings, you should make adjustments before you submit your image to print, otherwise you could be disappointed in the difference and you won't be in control of the effects of color conversion.
Most of the time the problem and its solution lie in the over-saturation of colors. So create an adjustment layer for Saturation in your image.
Then choose the channel in which the most warnings show (if it's in a grassy field, choose the green channel, if it's someone's red sweater, choose red, etc.)
Adjust the saturation down, until many or most or all of the gamut warnings disappear.
Another option is to create a Levels adjustment layer, and use that instead to adjust colors to remove some of the gamut warnings.
Minimizing these gamut warning areas now will minimize color shifts when your image is converted to a CMYK, or print, color space.
Overall, we recommend that the "Intent" be set to "Relative Colormetric." For a detailed explanation of what these four rendering intents do, please visit this informative tutorial here.
This tutorial does a good job explaining the difference between Photoshop's four rendering intents: Perceptual, Saturation, Relative Colormetric, and Absolute Colormetric. And it will help you know when it's a good idea to use one of the other options besides Relative Colormetric.
(It's also a good idea to know what your other settings in the Color Settings menu are set to, as well, but we aren't covering that, right now.)
Now your conversion of an image from one color space to another will be less surprising, whether you convert your image in Photoshop, or you let your print provider do the conversion from RGB to CMYK in their workflow.
Why All This Matters to You
As you design your print projects, keep in mind the differences between the RGB and CMYK color spaces, or gamuts. Because they are different, what you see on your monitor will not necessarily represent what you see on paper, and what you print out on your inkjet or color laser printer does not necessarily represent what you will get from your print provider.
In fact, without any controls in place, it is a sure thing that they won't be the same.
Remember that each device has it's own color gamut. Each monitor, printer, and press will display or print your image slightly differently from your monitor, your printer, and your print provider's press.
This is one reason why the proofs that a print provider give to you are so important. The color proofs from your print provider should show what you can expect your images to look like when printed. Here at Lorraine Press we've put a lot of effort into making our color proofs an accurate reflection of what you will see on our presses at the press check.
Also, when working in cross-media marketing campaigns, knowing about color spaces and how they basically work can help as you choose colors that can look good for your projects in any medium — especially if you are using web and print in your campaigns.
Hopefully, if there are any readers still out there reading what has to be one of the longest blog posts I've ever written, this has helped introduce what color gamuts are and how they affect your projects.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Color Spaces Part 1
We are going to start off today's post with a thought exercise.
Imagine all the different visible colors, the millions upon millions of all different shades and hues. Now, picture them as a three-dimensional sphere, with white on the top most point, moving to pastels and light colors until the "equator" which has the most saturated pure colors, and then shading towards black at the bottom most point. If you start spinning your sphere, like a globe, on its White/Black axis, you would see the colors of the rainbow along the equator morph from red to orange to yellow, to green, cyan, blue purple, magenta, back to red, etc. as it turns.
Okay, you can stop spinning around. Got your sphere in your mind? We are going to pretend that this is an accurate 3D model of all the visible colors.
In reality, the 3D image of all visible color is not nearly as perfect or even very spherical, but reality is usually messy and this is just a thought exercise!
Now, inside of your sphere of all the visible colors of the world is another sphere, a smaller subset of colors. This is what we see on our computer monitors and televisions. This is the RGB color set. It can't re-create all the colors we can see with our eyes, but there are still millions of colors it can produce.
Inside that sphere is another smaller sphere. This one represents all of the colors that can be printed in ink, on paper. In our perfect imaginings, this sphere is smaller, and it will represent an average CMYK color space, for example all the colors that our printing presses here at Lorraine Press can reproduce with the normal four colors of ink.
This is a very simplified way of thinking about color spaces. But it's also a helpful way of imagining what is happening to your image during the printing process without getting into the nitty gritty and usually complicated details of color spaces. Each of step of capturing and then printing an image uses a different color space: seeing something colorful, taking a picture of it with your digital camera, looking at it on your monitor, and printing it out on your printer.
If you are interested in what a CMYK color gamut looks like in reality (the smallest sphere you imagined), click here to go to a blog post by Gordon Pritchard. The post is talking about spot colors, but the 3D image of a CMYK gamut is a good one.
Now, imperfect, messy reality demands that each monitor, digital camera, and printing device has its own unique color subset, or sphere, its own subset of possible colors it's able to reproduce. Some are RGB and some CMYK. And also in reality CMYK color spaces can even intrude outside parts of the RGB color space in certain colors.
Each imagined sphere, or color space, also called a color gamut, represents the complete subset of colors that can be accurately reproduced in that color space. It is a measured fact that the visible color gamut is much larger than the RGB gamut which is in general larger than the CMYK gamut. And this is a reality we all must live with, and it can get messy.
Here is another (two dimensional) way to look at it: (graph courtesy of Wikipedia)
The gray area represents the entire visible spectrum. And the colored triangle is what an average monitor can show. (Even though each monitor is slightly different, the technologies we use can only display a small portion of visible colors.) It may seem limiting, but your eyes are usually happy with what they see.
It gets a little more complicated when you add in the CMYK color space, but here is another graph which adds the typical CMYK color space with the typical RGB values inside of the visible spectrum: (graph courtesy of BU, who pulled it from Jackson, Richard, MacDonald, Lindsay and Freeman, Ken, Computer Generated Color, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, West Sussex, England 1994, page 221)
The CMYK area is the pentagram looking shape represented by the dotted line. Note the areas of green (at the top of the RGB triangle on the graph) and blue (the bottom left corner of the RGB triangle) that the CMYK color space cuts through. These areas involve colors that you can readily see on your monitor, but are impossible to reproduce in regular CMYK printing.
These colors are called out of gamut for the CMYK color space. There is no way to make the CMYK gamut print those colors. Therefore, when viewing a photograph on your computer screen, you should keep in mind that it is possible that there are places in your photo that CMYK won't be able to reproduce. Adobe Photoshop has a tool that can show where these places are in an image.
In Photoshop, on a Mac or PC, have your image open, then click on View, then go down to Gamut Warning. Or if you like keyboard shortcuts, hold down command and shift and the "Y" key to toggle the Warning off and on. Here is a regular RGB image, opened up in Photoshop:
If we then turn on Gamut Warning in Photoshop, grayed out areas will appear and usually look speckled:
Note the grey speckles within the black circles. These are areas that are out of gamut. This is just a warning. And it doesn't change anything in your image. It just turns on and off. Now you are probably wondering what to do about the warnings. We'll talk about that in Color Spaces - Part 2.
In the next blog post, Color Spaces Part 2, since this one is already way too long, (kudos to anyone who made it this far!) I'll explain more about color gamuts, color conversions, and why knowing about color gamuts is important to those wanting to print in color.
Imagine all the different visible colors, the millions upon millions of all different shades and hues. Now, picture them as a three-dimensional sphere, with white on the top most point, moving to pastels and light colors until the "equator" which has the most saturated pure colors, and then shading towards black at the bottom most point. If you start spinning your sphere, like a globe, on its White/Black axis, you would see the colors of the rainbow along the equator morph from red to orange to yellow, to green, cyan, blue purple, magenta, back to red, etc. as it turns.
Okay, you can stop spinning around. Got your sphere in your mind? We are going to pretend that this is an accurate 3D model of all the visible colors.
In reality, the 3D image of all visible color is not nearly as perfect or even very spherical, but reality is usually messy and this is just a thought exercise!
Now, inside of your sphere of all the visible colors of the world is another sphere, a smaller subset of colors. This is what we see on our computer monitors and televisions. This is the RGB color set. It can't re-create all the colors we can see with our eyes, but there are still millions of colors it can produce.
Inside that sphere is another smaller sphere. This one represents all of the colors that can be printed in ink, on paper. In our perfect imaginings, this sphere is smaller, and it will represent an average CMYK color space, for example all the colors that our printing presses here at Lorraine Press can reproduce with the normal four colors of ink.
This is a very simplified way of thinking about color spaces. But it's also a helpful way of imagining what is happening to your image during the printing process without getting into the nitty gritty and usually complicated details of color spaces. Each of step of capturing and then printing an image uses a different color space: seeing something colorful, taking a picture of it with your digital camera, looking at it on your monitor, and printing it out on your printer.
If you are interested in what a CMYK color gamut looks like in reality (the smallest sphere you imagined), click here to go to a blog post by Gordon Pritchard. The post is talking about spot colors, but the 3D image of a CMYK gamut is a good one.
Now, imperfect, messy reality demands that each monitor, digital camera, and printing device has its own unique color subset, or sphere, its own subset of possible colors it's able to reproduce. Some are RGB and some CMYK. And also in reality CMYK color spaces can even intrude outside parts of the RGB color space in certain colors.
Each imagined sphere, or color space, also called a color gamut, represents the complete subset of colors that can be accurately reproduced in that color space. It is a measured fact that the visible color gamut is much larger than the RGB gamut which is in general larger than the CMYK gamut. And this is a reality we all must live with, and it can get messy.
Here is another (two dimensional) way to look at it: (graph courtesy of Wikipedia)
The gray area represents the entire visible spectrum. And the colored triangle is what an average monitor can show. (Even though each monitor is slightly different, the technologies we use can only display a small portion of visible colors.) It may seem limiting, but your eyes are usually happy with what they see.
It gets a little more complicated when you add in the CMYK color space, but here is another graph which adds the typical CMYK color space with the typical RGB values inside of the visible spectrum: (graph courtesy of BU, who pulled it from Jackson, Richard, MacDonald, Lindsay and Freeman, Ken, Computer Generated Color, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, West Sussex, England 1994, page 221)
The CMYK area is the pentagram looking shape represented by the dotted line. Note the areas of green (at the top of the RGB triangle on the graph) and blue (the bottom left corner of the RGB triangle) that the CMYK color space cuts through. These areas involve colors that you can readily see on your monitor, but are impossible to reproduce in regular CMYK printing.
These colors are called out of gamut for the CMYK color space. There is no way to make the CMYK gamut print those colors. Therefore, when viewing a photograph on your computer screen, you should keep in mind that it is possible that there are places in your photo that CMYK won't be able to reproduce. Adobe Photoshop has a tool that can show where these places are in an image.
In Photoshop, on a Mac or PC, have your image open, then click on View, then go down to Gamut Warning. Or if you like keyboard shortcuts, hold down command and shift and the "Y" key to toggle the Warning off and on. Here is a regular RGB image, opened up in Photoshop:
Note the grey speckles within the black circles. These are areas that are out of gamut. This is just a warning. And it doesn't change anything in your image. It just turns on and off. Now you are probably wondering what to do about the warnings. We'll talk about that in Color Spaces - Part 2.
In the next blog post, Color Spaces Part 2, since this one is already way too long, (kudos to anyone who made it this far!) I'll explain more about color gamuts, color conversions, and why knowing about color gamuts is important to those wanting to print in color.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
And I thought I loved fonts . . .
A few nights ago, I saw the movie trailer to Sucker Punch.
My husband said, "Wow, that looks like it could be kinda creepy or really cool, or both." At the same time, I said, "I love that font! Where do you think I could find one like it?" He just looked at me. I wasn't sure exactly what he was thinking right then, but in amongst his thoughts was probably, "Weird."
That wasn't the first time we both were looking at the same sign, movie poster, or anything with type on it, and he read the message and I saw the font. He really should be used to my rhapsodies over fonts by now.
However, before today, I thought I really liked fonts, knew a lot of stuff about them, liked trolling for new ones online, and that this made me a little odd to the rest of the world. But no. Today I found out I was functionally normal, a mere dabbler in the world of typography. Not at all consumed by the topic.
That's because I discovered the ilovetypography blog by John Boardley. And when I resurfaced two hours later, I knew I was just an unlearned novice in the world of fonts and typography.
If you have any interest at all in the subject, visit this blog. It is a fantastic resource for all things type. Just looking at his font picks alone, you could be drooling for hours. I know that I fell in love with several fonts immediately. Plus, he has links to numerous helpful resources that will further submerge you in the world of typography. The blog will lead you to numerous type foundry sites, beautiful books about type (even a couple of kids books!), histories on typefaces, font news, and helpful hints.
So the next time someone looks at you funny for going on and on about a particularly unusual or beautiful use of typography, just know that you have company. There's lots of us out there, some more knowledgeable than others, but all of us with an appreciative eye for interesting typography.
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