Registration or Trapping

Task: Look carefully at the printed pieces that cross your desk and see if you can spot instances of where the inks are "out of register." Is it something you personally would have sent back (given the option) or was it not worth worrying over?

These tasks and examples are from "Daily Goals" posted in the DTP Classroom forum in connection with the Never Stop Learning Plan for 2003. They are presented here in a dual role as exercises for learning design and brainstorming material for developing new designs.

More Brainstorming & Analysis Exercises

Examples/Discussion: Have you ever picked up a printed piece and noticed little white gaps between colors or a darker bit of color where two colors overlap that didn't seem quite right, looked like a mistake? The piece may not have had proper trapping or no trapping at all and when printed the colors didn't match up quite the way they were supposed to.

I must admit I haven't seen many examples lately but after close examination (closer than most recipients would probably give it) I found an interesting little registration problem with a nicely done brochure that came in the mail today. The problem is actually two-fold. One spread contained a couple of blocks (1 gold, 1 green) of overlapping blocks of spot color that also overlapped the crease - and in this case each section of the blocks were printed on different pieces of papers (i.e. this wasn't a center spread) and the blocks were out of alignment every so slightly. I might not have even noticed except that one portion of the gold block was also every so slightly out of register so that it left a narrow border of a different color between it and the green block that wasn't present between the gold and green portions printed on the other page. Each of the "alignment" problems with the blocks alone may be easily overlooked but together it made the piece just a little less perfect than it could have been (truthfully, it was a very minor thing but, hey, I needed an example to tell you about!).

Discuss It!

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This document is part of these Desktop Publishing learning tracks • How a Desktop Published Document is Created  ~ File Preparation > Prepress • Never Stop Learning Plan  ~ Daily Goals > January • Brainstorming & Analysis Exercises  ~ Prepress & Printing