[Card Printing/Packaging] Hey Tony
guildofblades:
Hi All,
Well, if Ron or any other powers that be (are there any others here?) decide its not cool for me or any other service provider to not respond to comments about their service, good or bad, then I will certainly abide by that.
However, the idea that I should not be welcome here to participate on the forge would seem rather silly, since I have been here for 8-10 years or so I think. And I remain a principle owner of a small press game publishing company too, that does publish RPG material and will be publishing more in the future.
There have been issues that have come up, for certain. Some we've been able to correct either through refined processes or better equipment. With books its almost always binding and trimming. For instance, for a rush job we took this year, we ended up with a sizable books (450+ pages) with fairly small page margins. When trimming the books, we found the amount of blade drift (which always happens to some degree when cutting through a large stack of paper) caused the cut to drift into the outter page template print when doing the face trim. After 3 such bad trims, we worked it out with the publisher to bind the books and trim the tops and bottoms, but not the faces, then tweaked our binding process a bit to those face books faces to come out more square without trimming. They came out "decent", but not as I would have liked. If the book had had larger margins, likely would not have been an issue. If we had a lot of advance time on the production, it could have layed out again to have those wider margins. The time was not there. I suspect there must be some higher end hydrolic cutters that have the force and clamping pressure needed to cut such large books more squarely with far less blade drift, but I don't know which machines those might be and they are almost certainly larger than what would be ideal for a POD producer to use.
Some issues are merely those of expectations. Obviously as a producer we strive to meet all expectations, but sadly some can be unrealistic. The most common we have encountered is that of print and die cutting registration on ur POD cards. All printers have a registration variance. All die cutters do too. Combine them together and the combined affect can add up. Our average registration is NOT the equal of traditionally printed cards done by a printer that specializes in such. At least not one that is doing their job well. But sometimes there is an expectation that our variance should somehow come in smaller than even the traditional amount found on Magic the Gathering Cards and the like. Which, to be frank, is likely never going to happen (though we'll continue to try and figure out how to make it happen). Its not a realistic expectation, in my opinion. That being something we are unable to change, we are simply working on a greater amount of documentation and examples, so this can be clearly understood by potential clients up front so if they decide to move forward they can have measured expectations and can more adequately make designs that will compensate for such.
>>>Could you unpack that further? Was it a use of borders? Or is the art very detailed or "busy" so that one can't really say for sure where the center is?
And I concur with Jason, though I'd hope you'd make a template for a variety of DTP and illustration packages, not just the ($700+) InDesign (e.g. Inkscape, GIMP, Scribus, <<<
Hi David,
Well, the largest issue with arriving with good looking game cards, especially those done via POD, is compensating for registration variance. The simple reality is the image will print slightly off where it should on the sheet (registration variance) and the die cutting will be off slightly as well. That is a universal truth of printing and cutting anything. Its why for must full color fliers, book covers, etc, printers want a good 18" bleed. Obviously for cards, a variance of 1/8 would be fairly substantial. It is the challenge of good card production to lower that variance. We work with a maximum bleed of .1" and therefore also a maximum registration variance of .1", though our average variance is more like .03" or so.
Lets say you designed a card with a solid colored border. Black, white, whatever. If you content inside was a stark contrast from that border color, then the border itself will stand out more visibly. A finished card is 2.5" x 3.5". Lets say you design a border of .1" on either side of the card. If the card prints and registers .05" off the left side, with such a small border what you end up with is a left border of just .05" and then a right border of .15", making the right border 3 times larger than the left. That unbalance can look a bit funny. There are a lot of ways to design around this to compensate for it, from wider borders to no borders, to background images that extent over the borders and the bleed area, to borders with very similar design colors as the interior, etc. I am quite sure I haven't seen but a fraction of the design methods that can compensate for registration drift. With the expanded documentation we are working on, we are simply striving to bring how important the issue is to the final look of the cards and showing some methods on how to test how a particular design will fair.
I know that didn't exactly answer your question. I think Tony's cards blended main card content and the border areas well plus his artwork is simply awsome, so I suspect that it simply further detracts attention away from the borders. The end result being that his cards simply look dead centered, but if I were a betting man and knowing our production process, I would say they aren't truly centered. I wold expect there to be an average variance of about .03" in one direction or another, but with his design you just don't see it.
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Retail Group - http://www.gobretail.com
Guild of Blades Publishing Group - http://www.guildofblades.com
1483 Online - http://www.1483online.com
David Artman:
Thanks, Ryan--that's mostly what I thought.
Now... to finish that new Mafia design. ;)
Ron Edwards:
Hi there,
Just in case ...
Anyone who provides services or any other aspect of role-playing publishing is welcome to participate here, if those services et cetera are demonstrably useful to independent publishers. I can't say Guild of Blades is officially welcome or unwelcome; that makes no sense. Basically, Ryan is both promoting his services and opening them up to public critique by participating. I don't think he's ever over-stepped the bounds into raw advertising to jack a thread topic, which I'd moderate. (If you disagree, of course, you can always report a post, and I'll consider your point.)
I wish other fulfillers, printers, retailers, and distributors would do the same. Some have in the past and the vast majority have been welcome and have posted some great stuff. Ryan Dancy's points about what we do at the Forge were especially insightful. A few have tried to offer exploitative services as if they were colonials and we were savages, and in nearly every case, that resulted in near-massacres which I recall with pride.
Anyway, never mind the memory lane; my point is that the Guild of Blades presence here isn't an endorsement at the site level, so much as a degree of participation would be maybe easier to understand if it were one of many rather than all by itself.
I hope that made sense ...
Best, Ron
Paul Czege:
Hey Tony,
I think the Misery Bubblegum cards look great.
Can I ask what DTP program you used to lay them out? And you delivered them to GoB for printing as pdf files? Did you do RGB or CMYK images? Did you use a specific color palette when you colored and created them? What was the DPI of your artwork? Did you deliver a pdf comprised of a combination of raster artwork and vector text? Or was each card a fully rasterized image?
Thanks,
Paul
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