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A step by step guide to what, where and how, when advertising in the Jersey Evening Post
Step 4 Colour and mono advertisements Adding colour is an effective way of drawing extra attention to your advert. It is important to remember that a commercial printing press runs using only four colours. These colours are Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black or Key (known in the printing trade as CMYK). Combined together as printed dots, these four colours alone are what make up a full colour picture in the paper. If you look very closely at a picture in the paper, you will see these individual dots. There are two ways of adding colour to enhance your advertisement. Both are effective in their own separate ways. Full Colour The JEP press is a Goss web offset press, which prints industry standard web colour. Printing full colour is a four colour process. This means that any colour used would be made up from a combination of dots printed in the four colours of Yellow, Magenta, Cyan and Black. The JEP prints the colours in the following order: Yellow, Cyan, Black and Magenta. In effect, any advertisement produced for full colour must be separated into these four colours and must not be saved as Pantone, RGB or any other colour format. You should note that all images and pictures should be scanned and saved in CMYK format and not RGB (Red, Green, Blue) format. RGB format is the standard setting for colour on most home PCs and also on the internet, but is of no use at all for commercial printing. It is the advertiser’s responsibility to make sure images are sent correctly as CMYK images. Process Spot Colour Adding just one of the CMYK colours to your advertisement can be a very effective way to enhance its presence on the page. When used individually, these colours are called spot colour in the print industry. It is important to note that the more separate colours used in making up a colour, the greater the likelihood of incorrect registration and ‘fuzzy’ printing. For instance, if a bronze colour is made up from 100% Yellow, 50% Magenta, 25% Cyan and 10% Black, four different colours and different size dots make that colour. There is therefore a greater risk of errors in registration lining up the colour elements making a colour fall out of register. If this happens, particularly in text or boxes made up in the colour with text as white, the effect will be significant, despite the margin of error on the registration of the colours being within industry standards. This is because one of the colours is printed over the other, a tiny error will result in part of the white of the text being overprinted with dots from one of the colours, making the text harder to read. The main points that should be noted when designing an advertisement for any newspaper printing press are: 1. Do not use white out text on multiple (CMYK) colour backgrounds. 2. Do not make up text from multiple (CMYK) colour backgrounds, particularly if the text is a sans serif font and a small point size. 3. Ensure that any black used in an advertisement is a single black, and not a mixture of Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and Black. 4. Remember that newspapers are printed using this four colour process, a lightweight paper and a lot of water, and that the paper will change size slightly as it runs through the press units. This is known as stretch. It means that the colour in the last press unit will fall in a slightly different position at the head of the page than at the foot of the page, compared with the colour in the first unit. This is an unavoidable aspect of the web offset process and is a dilemma faced by all newspaper printers. It must be noted that this has more effect on text made out of multiple colours than on photographs because a picture is generally more able to withstand slight changes in register than multiple colour text. We are proud of the colour that is produced by our printing press. It is colour that is at least industry standard, and frequently exceeds the reproduction found in other regional and national newspapers. However, it must be recognised that the JEP is a newspaper and therefore provides quick, cost-effective results. The JEP will not be able to match the colour reproduction achieved by commercial printers of magazines and brochures, where both the process and the paper quality are different. The following section is a guide to show how white text responds when printed over the following colours in newsprint.
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Postal Address: PO Box 582, Jersey, Channel Islands, JE4 8XQ