Our brain feeds on all the information that our eyes see. It manages to recall some of it while forgets or buries the rest in the debris. So, how can we make sure that all the information you share is absorbed by your audience? I am not an expert on this topic but I do know one good way to do it – Infographics. The fact that you are reading this article makes me assume that you already know what infographics are and how effective these have emerged to be. In case you do not know about them, let me tell you briefly that infographics are a new way to present the information and present them in a form that people are compelled to read (and feed it to their brain). The subject of infographics is really vast and since I simply love them, I can talk and write on them for hours. We will do this but in some other post. For now, let us focus on a few things to keep in mind while making an infographic ready for printing.
Color Profile Matters
The first and foremost thing to do is to make sure that your infographic is designed in a proper color mode. When it comes to printing we have only 4 colors – Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK). All the remaining colors are made by mixing these 4 colors in different proportions. This makes it mandatory to design the graphics in the CMYK mode. All the major software like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw etc support CMYK mode. Make sure you tell your designer to operate on this mode if you plan to print your infographics.
Limit the Colors
There is a lot of difference between what you see on a computer screen and what you see on a paper. While a computer screen can use 50 shades of grey, we have to limit the overall color scheme to a mere few colors. The problem with printing technology is that that with every color, the cost of print increases. While Digital Printing does not suffer from this problem, the cost of getting digital print for an infographic is high (in straight words, not affordable). The best thing to do here is to limit your color scheme to a few colors (mostly 3 and not more than 5). This will reduce the printing cost upto a great extent and will help you get the work done quickly.
Look at the Fonts
The last thing you want to see happening is people losing interest in your sweet infographic because they cannot read what you have written (or rather printed). To avoid any such thing form happening with your infographic, there are 2 things that you must keep in mind:
- Make your font large enough
- Keep it a little fat
I know slim and thin is in but printing business stays away from these kind of fonts. The sole reason being – printers at times fail to print the fine lines of the thin fonts and as a result you get a beautiful infographic with missing font faces. Go for typography kind instead. These fonts not only look pretty but also catch attention in the print media. I would suggest Myriad Font or some similar font for this purpose. I mostly use Myriad (bold condensed) for my printed infographics.
Conclusion
Print media is all about saving as much as you can while getting the best out of your money. Prints have a very limited life. Unlike website content which can be accessed anytime, print media exposure is lost within a few days (for example, life of a newspaper is just one day and that of a magazine is at-most a month). For this reason, we have to be clever with this specific media. Keeping a check on the above things right from the starting will not only save you money but will also save you a lot of time in setting up things. If you still have any question on the topic, feel free to ask me using the comment section below.
You can get quick and quality printing of Infographics from overnight prints which is one of the big advantage of the overnight prints.
