One big poster in several stages of work.

It was a big (B1) poster for The Russian Theater of Roman Viktyuk. The play "The maids" in Latvian National Opera in Riga (Latvia). You can see some parts of that play onYouTube: http://youtu.be/iI4dYWRISxk Here I want to show the stages of that poster producing.

1.Stage. Incoming... assets. It was A4 flyer with scratches and creasing line after folding.

2. I have scanned it with 1200 ppi (pixel per inch). 
  


3. Scanned images from printed materials have one big problem: a moiré pattern (pronounced more-ay). (For more details you can read on here: http://www.scantips.com/basics06.html ). I had to remove a moiré pattern (the halftone screen) from the scanned image. I applied 1-pixels-size Gaussian Blur and decrease resolution of image several times. (I didn't use the integrated descreen filter at that time).

BaltHouse Ltd. Few screenshots of my works.

http://www.bhprint.lv/
This is one of the leaders of printing market in Latvia. Their customers are blue chip companies around the world.

Apple Mac. Adobe InDesign. Prepress mock-up layouts (impositions).

My own mock-ups for Candy (Italy) and MIELE (Germany).

Amber Dog magazine (2008)

 www.amberdog.lv

They invited me to make restyling of their magazine. Before, they used designers from outside their company. As a result, at that moment they didn't have any source files. I had to create everything from a very beginning. It wasn't first time for me. They provided me a good computer with two monitors. In my opinion, it's very convenient for magazine layouting. And my experience included image processing and retouching for a magazine cover as well.

Real Estate Catalogue

When i was a small boy... when i was a magazine designer...

http://www.balthaus.lv/ In 2005 i took a part in producing of a Real Estate Catalogue (twice a year). More than 270 pages. It had a lot of financial articles, tables with important information and so on... I had to create all object's and paragraph styles from a very beginning.
Four designers prepared ads, images for me. I had to compile all of them in one ready-to-print catalogue. Since that catalogue sometimes had to have 3 languages on the same page we had to use OpenType fonts like Myriad Pro and Times New Roman. They handle Unicode characters.

London. Artdeco magazine.

ARTDECO magazine. 

It was an incoming 64 pages mock up made in MicroSoft PowerPoint. But our printing factory accepts only pdf-files. MicroSoft PowerPoint program works with RGB colour system. It's good for presentation but bad for printing.

 I met following problems:
1. Wrong size (U.S. Letter page size, but customer expected A4 size)
2. RGB colour system (not CMYK)
3. There was Image's resolution from 72 ppi to 150 ppi (pixel per inch)
4. No bleed.
4. an RGB Black colour is not a  CMYK BlacK colour. As a result, in pdf-file we had few black colour with different shades) at different places. Sometimes you cannot see the difference on your screen (on your display)  - it depends on your monitor. But you will see this difference on a printed version of your mockup.

 The cover is a face of a magazine.  In order to get a cover of good quality with A4 page size I had to add a missing black area with exactly the same black colour. It wasn't enough. The PowerPoint program supports only rectangular-shape images. As you can see the main image has rounded corners. In fact it was a rectangular image with black areas at the corners. And that black colour differs from surrounded black colour.
Inside of the magazine we had pages with white background what doesn't make any problem to create missing bleed. Where it was possible I replaced low resolution images to good quality pictures.

This is one thing of hundreds of my prepress experience.

Adobe Illustrator (my main program)

I use Adobe PhotoShop for pictures correction and photo collages.
I love using Adobe InDesign for two purposes: when I create final one-side imposition. I am sure it's more easy and faster to use InDesign than Preps in that cases.

Second case when I love using InDesign is when I need to use Paragraph Styles and I need to apply them for an entire document. The excellent things are Master Pages, off course.

But my main program is Illustrator. I love use it to create one-side and double-side flyers (one or two pages documents). And Illustrator is a main tool to work with mock-ups for packaging. Of course I don't mention about 3D visualisation of a pack.

(On the picture I have shown one document with 3 languages for 3 countries (Germany, France, Russia).

Wireframing. One year ago I didn't know the name of this process. My previous boss asked me to make prototype of company's website in order to move elements and to apply different colours for them and to see the result.
Such a preview is not interactive but it's a not bad way for wireframing.

The export from CorelDraw into PDF-file (trouble with colour profile)

One occasion from my print designer experience.
Once i had a remote work for PlanetHouse. It was a temporary contract during three months.
CEO have visited us (two designers) in Latvia. First designer was a good-looking girl. She invited me to work with her. She knew only CorelDraw. And I have excellent knowledge in CorelDRAW and Adobe Creative Suit.
I want to say that CorelDRAW has its own colour management system different from Adobe. That programm is not bad for roll-up banners and big posters. But I compared the output colour many times and i know CorelDRAW can not make sure to you the exact expectable colour output. It's easy - the colours won't be saturated.
At some time, i obtained broken-down the output colour from CorelDRAW. I had pdf-file with bad quality colour. It was unexpected problem. It can happen with CorelDRAW at any time. This is why i don't like CorelDRAW. And happily we don't have it on the Apple Mac (maybe it exists i don't know).

This is a screenshot of pdf-file produced from CorelDRAW but it's covered with several circles with more saturated colours. Those are few pieces of a screenshot of pdf-file produced from AdobeInDesign. We can see the difference in colour.

How we printed Moscow Vodka

It happened about 10 years ago. I worked as a main graphic designer (and a head of computer department) for a big printing company in the Latvia. Before Latvia became a member of the Europe Union in 2004th we printed  a lot of production for Russia. After that it became very expensive to export production to a country outside the Europe Union. Our owner made his decision to move his company to the Russia. The latvian branch was sold and closed a little bit later. I worked for that company during about five years and then had to find a new work.
First i worked with MacOS 8 but later I installed MacOS X on the same computer. It was amazing! Computer worked faster than before.
One of our big customers was SPI Group Company (spi-group.com)
I've still got some mock-ups for their production. And now I'd like to tell about one alcohol label.
It's called Moskovskaya Vodka (It means Moscow Vodka):
The label of Moscow Vodka contains three bespoke colours (Red for logo - printed out as a Magenta, Green for background - printed out as a Cyan, and Black for text). Orange ("Yellow") colour presents Hot Foil. We printed out a special separated film for foil with 99,65% scaling because a metal plate will be increased after heating. The 99,65% scaling was our company know-how. We found out it ourself. And the black text "Moskovskaya" has been embossed for protection. At the end it was covered by UV varnish. Black colour was overprinted and covers green colour. We applied hand-made trapping as well.
I have seen the different design of this label for different countries.