Many of the articles on this site are aimed at the digital space, such as design for the web, mobile and apps. And let’s face it, most design in general is done in the digital space, much of it never makes it on to paper. But what about when you do want to take your designs from the virtual to the physical world – from digital to print?

It can take a lot of tinkering to get your print designs to look right. Though your designs may look great on the screen, that might not be the case once it has been printed. A thorough proofing process is essential for getting a print piece that looks just as you expect.

Misprinted work is costly. If it’s a problem with your file, you will likely have to fork over more money to fix it. If you can’t afford reprints, you may have to keep the incorrect piece or wait until you can afford to reprint. If it’s a client project, the mistake could put a dent in their plans, your bank account, and your business’s reputation.

A thorough proofing process can head off most print design issues. Though nothing is foolproof, keep the following points in mind with your next print project:

Words, Words, Words

Spellcheckers are unreliable. Read every word in the piece several times before sending it off for printing. Check your work, make corrections, recheck it, and then have someone else review it.

When working really closely on a project, your brain can fill in letters and words where they don’t exist. Having another pair of eyes check it over can eliminate these mistakes.

By Accident or by Design

During the process of creation, sometimes something important can end up being left out. Some of the most common mistakes include inconsistency of fonts, colors, shadows and other minute details. If you made a big change in multiple areas, such as font or color, evaluate each element carefully to ensure that the change was made every place it needed to be changed.

Additionally, if you’re creating something for a client, compare the design to the original specs to make sure you’ve included all of the necessary features.

True Colors Shining Through

Matching colors on the screen to colors on the paper can be difficult. From the design program, to the final digital file, to the print provider’s presses, each could affect the final results. Though many graphic designers and photographers like to work in RGB, digital printing is often carried via a CMYK process. Some printers will print from your RGB file. Otherwise, you can convert the design to CMYK yourself, though it may take some knowledge and adjusting to get the colors to look right.

How your monitor is calibrated may also affect how you see the colors on the screen, versus how it will look in print. One way to get an idea is to print a test image and compare it to what’s on your screen. You may find you need to make adjustments to your design’s colors.

Resolution, Baby!

For small print jobs like business cards, brochures or booklets, it’s recommended that images be saved at 300 DPI. There’s more flexibility for image resolution with large format jobs, such as banners and signs. For photographic images on canvas, 100 DPI is considered plenty. A good rule of thumb is to always save your design image files with the highest resolution possible. Though you can scale the image down if you must, it is impossible to add pixels after the fact.

Bleeds, Crops & Cuts – Oh My!

A bleed is part of the design that extends beyond the crop marks and is cut off in the finishing process. Crop marks indicate to the printer where to cut the design to get the size and shape you desire. Cutting tolerance is the small variations that occur when sheets are cut down to size by machine. Setting up your design file to suit your printer’s bleed, crop mark, and cutting tolerance requirements is essential to getting the final printed design you expect.

Bleed and crop mark expectations vary from project to project and printer to printer, but many small format jobs require 1/8″ bleeds, while many larger format pieces may need a 1/4″ or larger bleed. A high quality printer has a cutting tolerance that measures no greater than 1/16″.

Pick the Perfect Paper

How the colors look for the final printed piece will depend on the substrate you choose. Coated paper has a smooth, satin-like finish that is somewhat resistant to dirt and moisture. A coating will restrict how the paper absorbs ink, which helps to maintain clarity and is desirable for printing photographs and other sharp images.

Uncoated paper is generally not as smooth, with a slightly rough feel. It has a tendency to be absorbent, like a sponge, which can cause ink to spread on the paper and result in less crisp lines. Work with your printer to find the right substrate if you’re not sure which to use.

Fit to Print

Use your home or office printer to print it out with standard paper, cut it down, and fold it, if needed. This will give you a glimpse at how your printed project will look, giving you the chance to refine your design if needed. Once you’ve sent your design file to the printer, you will also get a digital proof to approve.

Go ahead and print the digital proof, too. Although this in-house test print won’t necessarily show exactly what you can expect, it will give you a good idea. Evaluate your digital proof very carefully because this is often the last step before your order is printed.

Proof is in the Proof

Digital proofs are ideal due to the ability to create and send them quickly and cheaply, but there are times when it’s best to get a hard proof. If the substrate has distinctive properties, such as metallic paper or synthetic materials, or you’re trying a new printing technique such as white ink printing, request a hard proof to see the design on the medium.

You may also want a hard proof if you have precise brand colors to replicate. There is usually a cost to ordering a hard proof, but it’s a small price to pay to know what to expect when your order is delivered.

Concluding

After stepping through this checklist and ensuring that the interested parties are happy with how the proofs look, the final step is approving the project for printing. You’ve made the effort on your part to make sure it goes off without a hitch; the rest is up to your printer. If you’ve done your homework to find a quality printer, you’ll know that when you receive the final product it will be exactly what you want. But that’s another checklist for another article on another day.

What do you do if you’re partway through an important project for a client and you get, well… stuck? You simply can’t wring any more good ideas from that brain of yours, and none of your ordinary tricks to relieve creative block are working.

To many designers, this is the kiss of death, but I’m here today to tell you that it doesn’t have to be. We’re going to explore some unusual, but very effective ways to get those creative juices flowing again, so that you can get back in the flow of things and continue to wow your clients.

Creativity in Routine?

Here’s a fact about the human brain that you may not know: every single decision you make throughout your day will have a negative effect on your ability to successfully complete a task. That’s right – whether it’s choosing which color to make that drop down menu, or whether you should wear that green shirt or the blue one, every time you’re forced to make a decision, you lose just a bit more mental energy.

This is why you may find yourself burnt out by lunchtime if you begin your day by answering emails or answering silly questions from dense clients. Those small decisions have used up a huge amount of your energy for the day. Sure, you can recover some of it by eating a nutritious lunch or having a quick nap, but you won’t be quite as productive after noon as you were before.

Adopting systems and routines that automate a lot of your daily decisions can help tremendously in recovering some of that creativity you thought was lost forever. Consider taking a full day to plan the little things you know you will have to do for the week, even down to what color shirt you’ll wear. Try to batch your email responses if you can – it’s not a crime to cut and paste responses if they’re relevant and get the point across. The more things you can automate, the more you can turn your focus to the work that truly matters.

Getting A Jolt of Energy

Starting a new project can be very intimidating. And yes, I’m about to use yet another of my famous food analogies, so get ready. Have you ever been to restaurant, and the waiter hands you a menu that’s absolutely terrifying? I don’t mean it has teeth or it growls at you or anything like that. I mean, there are so many items on the menu, and the descriptions are so lengthy, that you almost lose your appetite and want to run back out the front door? Too much choice can do more than confuse us – it can just about ruin our experience and make us want to hide while we try to process everything in front of us.

For me, it seems like the more freedom I have with a design project, the scarier, more confusing, and more impossible it becomes to get started. Of course, freedom in my design work is something I’ve strived very hard to achieve, and I’m very fortunate to have it. But sometimes, with a big, hairy project deadline looming over my head, I almost wish I was a student again, with rigid assignments and a limited scope as to what I could work on.

What’s the solution to this problem? I’ve found that doing something spontaneous to get my blood pumping and my creative energy flowing helps tremendously. Exercise is the most obvious choice here, and I don’t need to tell you how many ills it can help cure besides creative block. However, there are other options, such as spending quality time with friends or loved ones, working on something else, like a personal project, or, my personal favorite, cooking.

Calm Those Jitters

Sometimes, your problem isn’t that you’re frightened into submission by your project. Rather, you’re inundated with too much energy, which can manifest as nervous fidgeting, hair-pulling, or procrastinating by doing meaningless busy work. This can be just as maddening because you’re not sure exactly where to begin, and you know you should be doing something productive, but you just can’t figure out what.

You may not realize it, but your brain is like clay. Whatever approach you decide to take for your work will leave an impression on your brain for next time. So, if you react to a challenging project with stress, nerves, or excessive anxiety, you’re saving a copy of that reaction in your brain’s hard drive, which it will automatically pull up every time you’re faced with a similar dilemma.

In this case, you need a solution that will burn off or diminish some of that excess energy. A calming activity, such as meditation, walking, journaling, or reading, will help soothe your brain and help it focus on the task at hand.

What Do You Think?

How do stress and lack of focus impact your ability to complete projects successfully and on deadline? What methods have you devised for coping with these problems that all designers share? Let us know in the comments.

ThemeForest is running a limited-time discount on all its email templates. You get a flat 30% discount on all email templates till 12pm on 17th February (AEDT). With over 600+ designs to choose from, you will find something that will suit your needs. Most of the email templates on sale are also highly customizable, so you can easily edit them to go along with any campaign you might be running.

Email promotion is a great way to engage with your core audience. People who sign up to your mailing list are actively looking to hear about the great deals and promotions you might be offering. ThemeForest offers various email templates that can help you add a fresh lick of paint to you email marketing efforts. They offer a range of different email templates ranging from newsletter templates to templates for catalog emails.

Some might say that email marketing is an inferior marketing channel when you consider more modern channels like social media and mobile marketing. Well those people probably have no idea what they are talking about. According to a report in mid-2013 from marketing data firm Custora, the rate that customers are acquired through email has quadrupled over the last four years in online retail.

Recent studies by Experian Marketing Services and Movable Ink have seen an increase in consumption of marketing emails on mobile devices. Movable Ink’s data revealed that 65% of marketing emails were opened on a smartphone or tablet in the fourth quarter of last year. It’s also worth mentioning that all signs point to this number increasing in the coming years.

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It’s one thing to make a great iOS app, but oftentimes the next step is to reproduce the experience for Android. It’s no easy task.

After gathering experience in that process at Two Toasters, I’ve put together some fundamental principles on reimagining an iOS app for Android.

1. Treat your Android app as a new product.

Despite the temptation to port over UI elements from iOS, it’s important to start from the ground up. Both platforms look, feel, and perform separately from each other.

Step one is to determine how many Android users you could have. If your app has a web counterpart, this part’s easy. Simply segment out the unique Android visitors and there’s a number you can start working with. If not, it’s still worthwhile to try surveying Android-specific users on places like Reddit or Android forums to get an indication of interest in the problem you’re solving. Why go through this effort? The truth is, you could be saving yourself a ton of effort and headache if now is not the right time to think about Android. Just like with any other product, a “we will build it and they will come” mentality isn’t a healthy mindset.

Next, it’s important to define the primary goal of this app. Remember, treating your Android counterpart as a mere copy of your iOS app won’t go well with your potential users. Perhaps your Android app will function differently than the other? Are you seeking to increase conversion? Maybe your goal is simply to grow your user base? It’s not necessarily a given that this goal be the same as your iOS app. The app needs a reason for existence according to your overall business strategy – so identify that reason before you get started.

Last, examine your iOS app and re-evaluate your feature set with your goal in mind. This part’s a bummer, I know. You’ve already spent so much time perfecting your iOS app. But here’s why it’s important: First, you probably have limited resources. The longer you wait to get your product out, the more you stand to lose market share with competitors. Equally important, your Android and iOS customers are different kinds of users. Sure, they’re both humans; but consider the two differing ecosystems. What your app offers may have redundancies on the Android platform as opposed to iOS. Identify how your app fits on the platform, then build accordingly.

2. Design your app to adapt

It’s no secret that device fragmentation on Android is a big challenge. But tackling adaptive layouts that uniquely target varying resolutions can be a Sisyphean struggle. Instead, design an aesthetic and layout that can expand and contract gracefully. Then see if you can optimize experiences around the more popular resolution blocks.

It can be a laborious process, but here are some tips to help:

• Learn about Density Independent Pixels (dp) and Scale-Independent Pixels (sp). This is essential in understanding how your UI elements will be sized.
• Rely on native elements where possible. They’re already designed to respond to differing resolutions and incredibly easy to restyle by just replacing the default theme assets.
• Use responsive design strategies such as:

1. defining layouts with margin insets instead of fixed-widths,
2. using columns (particularly with grids) whose counts are based on screen-width,
3. letting images/photography scale-to-fit your UI elements while maintaining their aspect ratio,
4. having lists expand fluidly, but anticipating where elements fall, and
5. setting max-widths to portrait and landscape views to keep lines of text from getting too long.

• Tile background images or use 9patches to stretch them. Minimizing your assets will reduce the memory footprint of your application.
• Cut assets for at least HDPI, XHDPI and XXHDPI. These are the higher density resolutions-for everything lower, Android will automatically scale assets down.
• Optimize for a landscape experience. Tablets, phablets; these sort of devices are practically meant for landscape viewing. Think about what information can be pulled into another column, what elements can be consolidated, and if more information can be provided in a landscape orientation.

3. Take advantage of the Android platform’s differences.

Android is characteristically a less limited platform than iOS. So why not re-imagine the app to take advantage of these freedoms? Make it unique to Android users, not just available to them.

First, read the Android Design Guidelines. This will be an invaluable resource in helping internalize Android so you can build a good native experience.

Navigation can be a bit different on Android. Spend some time on the platform and gain a sense of its differing paradigms. An app that adheres to the analogous structure of iOS will surely feel different than the native structure of Android. Of course not all navigation structures should be similar, but figure out if there is one that makes more sense than that found in your iOS version. This is particularly relevant if you’ve decided on a feature set that isn’t a parity for your iOS app. (Hint: pay attention to Google’s own apps. The way they solved navigation problems probably didn’t have iOS navigation in mind.)

Build widgets. They’re an awesome tool to encourage customization, iOS doesn’t have them, they can expand the functionality of your app, and they give more real estate for you to reach your users. But make sure you do it right: Does it just let your user access media controls? Does it quickly throw them into a section on your app? Does it display information? (If so, make sure it stays fresh.) In all these cases, apply the same responsive strategies as before, but optimize for smaller areas. Especially since your user likely prefers that the widget be resizable.

Design your app icon with transparency. It doesn’t actually have to be a rounded square. The guidelines suggest following a follow a three dimensional, top front view. However, you can be creative about the shape, angle and aesthetic of the icon. Just remember that it has to scale down to very small sizes. An icon can be well designed, but if it’s too-reliant on miniscule details, it could end up not looking quite right in practical use.

See if other Android apps could do some of the work for you. Tying in with other apps means you don’t have to build every piece of functionality yourself and makes the Android experience more integrated for the user. For example, if you’re linking to web content, push it to chrome. (Building your own web views can be clunky.) If you need the user to capture audio, photos or videos, link to them to a media recording app that handle these well. Use the native share action provider so that you can easily share out to any app that accepts the style of content you want to share without having to build it out yourself.

Make the app international! For instance, separating copy in a strings file makes it easier to update to other languages. Although, you should remember to design the content and UI elements with added strings of information in mind. It’s possible your content cells may need to have content flow from right to left or even expand to fit longer strings when translated. Luckily, you don’t have to worry about the actual conversion; a recent update to the Play Store has added the ability to hire translators.

Update often. The Play Store allows developers to release updates much more quickly than the iOS App Store. It even allows you to do alpha and beta releases so that you can update a small percentage of users at a time, letting you work out kinks before shipping to everyone. Taking advantage of the Play Store’s update mechanisms will demonstrate to the users your active investment in improving the app.

And speaking of your users; listen to them. This is perhaps the best advice when converting to Android. A user is required to authenticate with a Google+ account when leaving reviews, which means that you can directly correlate the reviewer with their actual identity. So take the time to reply to comments and respond to feedback personally. Dialogue with your users not only helps in building a great app according to their feedback, but promotes a loyal user base that’ll stick with your app as it grows.

You can sign-up to our awesome weekly newsletter for some more amazing articles, resources and freebies.

Worth Reading

Smashing Mag published: Typographic Design Patterns And Current Practices.

Alan Stearns wrote about baseline grids for the web.

The difference between fixed, fluid, responsive layout? Liquidapsive (Liqui-dap-sive) will help.

Neil Wright discusses why iOS7 does and doesn’t reflect Apple’s core brand.

CSS trickery and calc function from Hugo Giraudel.

Typekit wrote about kerning on the web.

Loz Gray published his notes on the recent responsive Guardian redesign.

Fullscreen overlay effects tutorial from Codrops.

Creating Guided Product Tours like Google & Facebook.

New Resources & Services

InstantClick – A Javascript library that speeds up your website.

Fluidbox – A jQuery plugin for beautiful lightboxes.
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jquery.wanker.js – The web was meant to be read, not squished.
1

Vafpress – WordPress Administration Framework.
2

Octocard – Highly flexible info card for every Github lover.
3

Sache – Find Sass and Compass extensions for your next project.
4

Command line cheat sheet & tips & tricks.
5

Designer Freebies

Crates – A free, responsive & grid-based tumblog theme for WordPress.
6

The Bitcoin Icon Set (100 Icons, SVG & JPG).
7

Fanicons Vol.1 (40 Icons, PSD, AI & EPS).
8

65 Bold & 65 Light Weather Icons (EPS).
9

High-Res Polygon Backgrounds (JPG).
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Valentines Vector Pack (AI & EPS).
1

100 Seamless Fabric Textures (PAT).
2

…some inspiration…

Inferno Typeface – A Flaming Typographic Experiment.
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…and finally…

AIGA presents… 100 Years of Design.
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