OUGD504 - SB1 - A-Z: Type in Context - Final Design Refinements & Production

After making the adjustments raised in the test print stages, there were a few final design refinements and production considerations that needed to be considered.

Final Design Refinements - As flush left text was chosen over justified text, the right margins of paragraphs needed to be ragged, as a poor rag creates distracting shapes of white space in the margin. After changing the point size to 10pt, some lines had very bad rags. An example can be seen below. To fix this, the text on every page was manually ragged to ensure that all the paragraphs are easy to read, with a good rag that goes in and out from line to line in small increments.

When showing Simon the third test print, a few orphans were pointed out - orphans result in poor horizontal alignment at the top of the column or page, which is not desirable in publication design. For this reason, all the text was carefully reformatted to ensure there are no more orphans in the entire publication. The ragging of the text also had to be considered.

Once all the text and images were in place correctly, a final spelling check was made before exporting the InDesign document to a PDF. Bleed and crop marks were included so that the commercial printers would complete the job successfully.

Production - As highlighted in the test prints, the printers at uni are not accurate enough to print double-sided sheets on, as the spreads come out very inconsistently after being folded. For this reason, commercial printing was a more viable route to take. If this publication was actually going to be produced and distributed, more than 200-300 publications would be made. For this reason, the commercial printing route would be chosen, as it is cheap and consistent.

Unfortunately, there are no commercial printers in Leeds that allow reasonable one-off print jobs with custom stock. For this reason, G.F Smith paper, which was initially going to be sourced and used, could not be chosen. In place of the custom stock, I was offered 2 coated matt paper options, which felt as high in quality as the G.F Smith stock.

A heavier gsm was picked for the front cover to protect the inner pages and make the publication more durable. The inner page paper is much thinner to ensure that the publication is not too thick - if it was too thick it would not be able to close or lay flat, which was one of the design aims when staple binding was chosen.

The company required a PDF with a 3mm bleed, which I had already done. This made the process very quick and straightforward. The paginated PDF that I gave to them can be seen below.



The company provided a quick turnaround and the final publication was ready after just a few days.