"I'm an editor of the literary magazine at Aspen High School in Colorado. Our litmag team has a theme (Spectrum), but we are short on ideas for layout and overall design. I'm also interested in cheaper methods of printing, having gone far over budget on our last two editions. Any advice would be greatly appreciated." -LarsTo discuss the second part of this comment. Printing, I think, is the biggest headache in publishing. In the short time that I have been involved with the printing part of the magazine I have seen a lot of stuff. We have gone from having the mag cover and binding pulled out from under us, to having the printer that we were working with being bought out.
In last year's magazine ! (Yep that's it "!"), we stumbled onto Duotone. This is a photoshop tool that can make a grayscale image appear to have a single color in it. You convert the image to grayscale and select a pantone color. It is hard to explain with out looking at an image or Photoshop. By doing this you give the impression of color in grayscale images, without the cost of 4-color. In your layout software, you can also create swatches using the pantone color that you used for the duotone image. This means that you are only going to be printing in black and one color. Pantone inks are the same, no matter what printer you go to. Pantone colors take the place of one of the inks that are part of CMYK. So you are only printing in two colors.
Binding is also something that can save you money. Look at several printers in your area. Talk to them and explain what you are doing. Perfect binding is one expensive option. You can go with a stapled binding as well. It really depends on what you want. Ask the printers for examples of their printing and their binding.
The last option, that I have to be honest I have little knowledge of, is online printing. Do a Google search and go from there.
I hope that this post, and the previous post, help to answer your questions Lars.
1 comment:
Thank you for the helpful advice! Our literary magazine is progressing slowly, but we have a clearer idea of where we want to go with it. We have found online printing to be a promising possibility; we've requested samples and have gotten quotes for the entire printing costs. Our area lacks cheap printing options, so the internet has opened whole new potential. We've also decided to have a logo for our magazine, Nepsa Merge. The Drawing and Design classes at our school will have an assignment to design the logo, and our staff will pick one to incorporate. However, there is one problem we have run into: a lack of submissions. Has your magazine experienced this? If so, then how did you deal with it?
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