The answers to everything duplication blog

Many customers love the shiny effect of the disc to come through the design. Silver effects can be printed on blank discs, replicated CDs or replicated DVDs. Here we’d like to bring up a few pointers for designers:

Example 1

Most discs (burned or replicated) have a clear inner ring (sometimes called a stacking ring). Essentially the canvas of the disc is not all silver, there will be a mix of silver and clear plastic. An example is shown here:

silkscreen printing on silver disc

Example 2

A workaround to the previous problem is to avoid silver of artwork to be around the center, or ask not to print in the stacking ring altogether:

Example 3

Printing full color image on silver can be interesting; all the white elements will appear silver, and since there is no white base, the entire image will look metallic as well, like our example here:

offset printing on silver disc

Example 4
If you are not a fan of the metallic look all over the disc, we can also apply a ‘partial white base’, meaning selective areas of the disc will have a white base coating. This will help bring out the expected color of the artwork, while still keeping the silver color coming through on other parts. In this example, a partial white base is applied underneath the England flag.

offset printing on silver disc with partial white base

Foil stamping is the way to go if you want shiny effects on certain elements of your artwork, such as titles, logos. Foil is stamped onto the cardboard and it does not get scratched off. Common foil color is gold (shown here is gold foil) and silver. Other custom colors are also available.

To setup foil stamp on your artwork simply create a separate layer for the foil elements and assign it a PMS color.

Colors on a printing press are created using a combination of four ink colors - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (called CMYK). These four inks are called process colors because they are the standard inks used in the four-color printing process. Your artwork must be in CMYK format (as opposed to RGB) before submitting.

Now you can be green whether you make 10 copies or 1,000 CD duplication! Introducing a new eco-friendly sleeve to package CDs and DVDs, featuring 100% post consumer waste, this sleeve is recyclable, and best of all, there is no minimum purchase.

The sleeve can either be used as is or a sticker can be placed on top to dress it up.

Silver knockout is the silver part that shows through the artwork of the disc, as the example here. When designing artwork for the silver knockout, simply use white and indicate on your artwork the white areas will actually be silver.

When the discs are printed we will then skip the normal white base and print the art directly on the silver disc. Take note that any CMYK printing on silver will have a slight metallic look. It can be avoided if a special white mask is created just for the areas that do require a white base. To do so create a separate white layer and indicate it as a special white mask. Extra film charges might apply.

When you receive pdf proofs via email, what are you really looking for? Our artwork approval checklist has it all, but what about proofing for color? Can we trust the colors from the monitor screen and say that’s how it is going to print? It’s an obvious and big NO-NO.

PDF proofs are meant for checking font types, images placement etc, while it gives you some indication of color, it is not at all accurate in telling how colors will turn out. Each monitor is calibrated differently and therefore the same pdf will look different on yours and the person sitting next to you.

Whether you are printing just a few or thousands CDs / DVDs, you can always request a hard copy printing proof. This is how you can accurately tell the artwork will print on the production machines, and it is the only way to correctly proof color. Artwork can be adjusted if the proof reflects color differences.

Common design software that are used today include Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Quark Express, therefore our CD DVD graphic templates are designed to work with them. However if you do not own these software you could still create your own design. Many burning software come with a label/cover design program with preloaded templates and will let you create simple CD DVD label and package without much technical knowledge on graphic design. When you are finished, the key is to export the final files to a non-proprietary format such as jpg, pdf or tiff so we can place it on our CD DVD design templates.

Thermal printing is a method we use for short run CD duplication and DVD duplication. The process does not require much set up and allows capacity of up to 1000 discs per day. However as in all printing methods there are certain limitations, if they can be avoided you can make sure to get the best possible print quality.

Tips for thermal on-disc printing:

1. Gradient effect: although it may look good on offset printing, gradient on thermal sometimes results color changes that are not smooth. Try using solids, pattern or photographic image instead.
2. Thin lines: avoid lines that are thinner than 0.3 pt, the result is pixelated lines with uneven colors
3. Small fonts: keep all fonts, even the small copyright copy to at least 5 pt. Text that is too small will be hard to read and look pixelated.
4. Grays and Blacks: avoid designs containing only grays and blacks. Distinctive and contrasting colors can achieve vibrant and pleasing results.
5. No Pantone allowed: thermal printing is essentially a 4-color process, so if your design contains any Pantone spot colors it will be converted to CMYK. If there is a color you need to match, bring a sample print or let our staff know the PMS number the piece needs to match. However the colors will never be the same as the Pantone.
6. Full color images: high-resolution photographic images is the best way to showcase the photo-listic feature of thermal printing, a combination of images, solids and text achieve great results

As always if you are unsure how your design will look on thermal printer, we provide production proofs, or ask to speak with one of our printing specialist.

Many clients ask how to insert special characters such as © (copyright), ™ (trademark) symbols in Photoshop or Illustrator. Here’s how to do it on a Mac and PC respectively:

Mac:

Step 1: First we are going to enable the special characters palette. Bring up the System Preferences menu, via Finder, then click on ‘International’

Step 2: Click on ‘Input Menu’ tab and check the ‘Character Palette’ box

Step 3: Now a symbol like an American flag should show up in the upper right corner, click on it and then click ‘Show Character Palette’

Step 4: Now the Characters window will appear, the © (copyright), ™ (trademark) and other popular symbols can be found under ‘Miscellaneous’. Browse through the other sets for foreign language characters. Once the symbol is selected, put your cursor where the character going to be pasted in the program (Photoshop, Word or others), then click on ‘Insert’ in the ‘Characters window’, whoa-la!

Windows:

Step 1: Go to ‘Start’, ‘Run’, enter ‘charmap’ in the text box and hit ‘OK’

Step 2: Select the font from the drop down menu, browse for the copyright symbol. Once you locate it then double click on click ‘Select’. Click ‘Copy’ to copy to clipboard. Now you can paste it into any program you desire (Photoshop, Word, Email, anything). Also note each font might have a slightly different set of special characters.

Proofing for artwork proof is an important step in the CD/DVD replication process. It gives you one last chance to see the artwork before it goes off to be printed thousands of times. Here is a checklist that might help you organize what needs to be verified:

• Bleed: make sure there is enough bleed, this is the area that is beyond the crop mark or trim lines
• Crop marks / Trim lines: look for crop marks or trim lines and make sure it is not cropping any important graphics or text off. If the artwork should bleed out, the graphic should continue beyond the trim. If the artwork has a white border, make sure to check the thickness of border is satisfactory
• Safe area: make sure no graphics or text is less than 1/8″ away from the trim or fold, or it might be cut off since the trim line will slightly shift during actual production
• Correct size: dimension of artwork should be correct, print and cut out the proof to ensure the right sizing
• Fonts / type: check to make sure correct fonts are displayed, whether it should be regular, bold or italics
• Text content: proof read all text to make sure there is no typo, however this should have been checked long before this step
• Correct images: make sure the right images have been used, especially when multiple revisions have been made
• Special effects: look for any drop shadow and transparency effects, make sure they show up correctly
• Spot colors: if any spot colors is used, it should be noted on the proof
• PDF artifacts: sometimes you might notice that the vertical strokes of certain letters such as ‘L’, ‘H’, ‘I’ might look thicker than the other letters. Usually this is a problem on the acrobat reader, and the way to verify it is the print the pdf proof out, it should be a concern if the problem does not show up on the actual print out.

These are our suggested minimum steps to verify we have received all the graphic elements correctly for print; if there are special requirements for your specific project, please check for that as well.

Remember, when you sign off on a proof, you indicate that everything on the proof is correct. If a problem is discovered afterwards it is likely that you will incur additional costs to fix it.

Next, we’ll talk about the different artwork proof options.