Design Tips

No matter what level of a designer you are, there is always more to learn on the road to perfecting your craft. One area that will be valuable to you when getting ready to print, it using blacks in your design and understanding how to determine what the printed result will look like. Read on to learn a little about how to properly use black in your designs. If you are a web designer, you are probably used to black simply being the absence of red, green and blue… just black. But in the print world black is measured on the CMYK scale, where K reflects the black ink. However, that”s not it! For instance, in Photoshop, the default CMYK values for black are actually 75%, 68%, 67% and 90%, whereas InDesign and Illustrator use the correct black CMYK values of 0%, 0%, 0%, amd 100%. So as many of us know from experience, importing a photoshop document into illustrator or InDesign, can have less than desirable results. For instance, if you created an image in Photoshop with a black background and you are getting ready to place it into an InDesign or Illustrator document with a black background, the blacks do not match. Another issue with the photoshop default can be seen in the total ink coverage of 300% which can cause an over-inking issue. The solution to this problem, is simply make sure that when using photoshop, convert the black to the correct CMYK settings. However, even if you aren’t using photoshop, printing large areas of black from InDesign or Illustrator may leave you disappointed. The 100% K value is ideal for printing crisp, black text. However, when it is used to fill a background or large area, it prints as a dark grayish (and yes, this is a small, yet infuriating mistake if you don”t catch it before printing). To fix this issue you will create a “rich black”, in which you add either 40%-60% cyan to the CMYK value (for a cool rich black) or 40%-60% magenta to the value (for a warm rich black). But only use this quick fix for large areas of black—Not for text: the multiple layers of ink on small text can result in blurring. Lastly, never print anything with “registration black”- this is a 100% mix of all four colors and would most likely get rejected by the printer. What combinations have you found for creating rich blacks?

Written by: Karly Poole