How to print books?
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- cannada
Book printing is a complicated process, I assume.
How are most "art" books printed? Are there some large printers that deal with specialty clients, or are they done by smaller "artsy" print houses?
When you have more than one print stock and want the cover to be a strange material with embossing, is that all done by one facility? How do you set up a file like that?
Any tutorials out there?
- ESKEMA0
You need to talk to a printer that does what you want, not all do those kind of jobs and specially, only a few accomplish a good finish without fucking it all up. Research in your area who's the printer to go for these kind of services.
Setting this up is not complicated, embosses are like UV spot coating, you provide a file with the area to be embossed or whatever in one color. It works like a layer mask that says "here you apply X effect". Other stuff, you just talk to the printer, so you have exact details on what you're doing.
- uan0
- Daithi0
If you’re a total beginner, paper companies are a good place to start. They’ll have samples that they’ll be eager to get into your hands, and at least some of them will be nicely printed. Find out who printed them, and talk to those printers about what you'd like to do. And you’ll have paper samples to work from too.
- rascuache0
Haven't printed a book for a while, but I've done a few and have always, always gotten better results out of smaller print companies. I think they're more likely to give a shit about it and put the effort in.
Nicest print job I ever got on a book was out of a company which was just four guys. Though they did sub out the foil blocking on the cover, actually, so if you want everything done by one shop then a smaller company might not be the way to go.
Regardless of the size of the company, if they're even remotely decent then they'll talk you through setting up the files and so-on.
- fresnobob0
There's no tutorials here, but the other day I came across this insane resource for getting art books/prints of any kind made. Its a huge, fully categorized list of printers.
- Gnash0
When I worked at the AGO most of our fancy art books where printed in Singapore