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Print in magazines getting smaller?


SeaVenom

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Before anyone says yes I know this is in the rumourmonger section but I couldn't see where else to put it. Anyway after buying model magazines for many years I'm sure the printed words have got smaller and much harder to read. I've compared some new magzines to older ones and it does seem to be the case. And some of the writing is on background colours etc that also affects being able to read them. Anyone else noticed this?

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Before anyone says yes I know this is in the rumourmonger section but I couldn't see where else to put it. Anyway after buying model magazines for many years I'm sure the printed words have got smaller and much harder to read. I've compared some new magzines to older ones and it does seem to be the case. And some of the writing is on background colours etc that also affects being able to read them. Anyone else noticed this?

! completely agree!

I deal with the print industry and the idiots are slowly taking over.

I usually find it's someone in "Marketing" who has the final say, and they should be taken outside and shot have a jolly good telling off!

Rick.

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Too true

Black writing on a dark background which is usually a old photo

Stupidity of the highest order I once rang a mag to complain and was told it was the latest trend in publishing

That moron got both barrels down the phone

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Have to agree , I hate it when an article is printed across a whole page photo as some publications do. It might be trendy , but it's awful to try and read.

Andrew

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I know what you mean. I find it exasperating. When will these people learn?

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I have to agree. As the years go on I find that, as my eyesight worsens, at the same time all publications are using smaller and smaller print.

Having been a graphic designer for printing I think the reasons for this trend are twofold.

1. Because the designers work on computers nowadays they don't have to read what is going in the publication on paper at it's true size and so never find out just how much of a struggle it is, especially if your eyesight is deteriorating with age.

2. It is likely that they are under pressure from management to keep the pagecount down while increasing content and including glitzy jazzy colour and images which are supposed to attract people to buy the magazine. Even in these days of high technology it is actually still very expensive to produce colour printing and even with the high prices charged for magazines I would guess that much of that price is absorbed just by paying for the printing and paper stocks. The bosses think that, because it doesn't cost anymore to cover a page in images than it does to have one small image on a page that it will increase sales to plaster the page with colour images.

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You should try being colourblind; yellow on white [or vice versa], red on blue, green on purple or blue etc; cant read any of it. Mag goes back on shelf, no sale.

I can see squiggles in Loft-full's posting [#6] but what does it say?

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Interesting point Fred. I think we often forget that there are a considerable number of people who suffer from Colourblindness as well. I think it is a condition which I certainly, and I am sure many others don't really have any idea just how it affects your view of the printing etc.

As for loft-full's posting it says: "know what you mean. I find it exasperating. When will these people learn?" I couldn't read it either due to it being so small so I highlighted it and copied and pasted it into the reply to this topic box using right click "paste as plain text" so that I could see what it said

Edited by Beardie
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I work in the print industry and I can confirm we are all idiots!!

To be fair to the print industry (I look at artwork all day and make it all ready for the press guys) its the designers, I have had discussions with designers and believe me they know best as they have a degree in design!

Well mine is in illustration and I have worked in the print industry for 15 years so just because you think you are a great designer, you know jack about print. And even when you tell them the correct way to set artwork up for print they will ignore you again and again. Funny though that they understand you perfectly well when you eventually tell them you are not printing their job until its correct. Well until they send the next piece in

Rant over (only ranting as I am having my lunch break and had to deal with a couple of stupid designers today already)

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Everything that has been said about 'designers' so far I whole-heartedly agree with! But, as a designer, I feel the need to at least try and redress the balance and stand up for us poor guys sat in the corner quietly muttering under our breaths about the 'b****y client'.

At the end of the day it is always down to the Editor or Art Director that is signing off on the design to what it looks like! If they are under pressure to keep word count up while increasing the image sizes and reducing the number of pages, something is going to give, and it'll probably be the typesize and leading (and probably the patience of the designer too).

I think Beardie makes a really good point with;

1. Because the designers work on computers nowadays they don't have to read what is going in the publication on paper at it's true size and so never find out just how much of a struggle it is, especially if your eyesight is deteriorating with age.

I am always amazed by the amount of times I hear, 'Well it looked OK on my screen' with a print job looks crap! Where the software/hardware is becoming easy and quicker to use, it is also creating more opportunities for people to cock it up!

Saw a prime example the other day when a designer friend was annoyed that some 6pt helvetica thin type set in a black which had been made up of all 4 colours, had come out unreadable, when I told him he was a fool and that it would never of worked in a month of Sundays, his response was 'well, why did the computer let me do it!' :banghead::badmood:

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Bright blue on a dark background is another fun one, and I often have to squint when reading books to the Boy, even with me gigs on! :nerd:

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Yup I had many conversations with "higher level" designers (I was just the guy who did the in-house design and tried to make work that came in from designers printable (and ordinary business men with their triumphs of Microsoft Frontpage or other packages equally unsuitable for commercial printing)) It was very difficult trying to get them to understand all the mechanics of turning jazzy images on their macs into something that actually works on paper. With regard to images behind coloured text, they may look superb on your screen where that photo looks quite bright but bring in just a tiny bit of mis-registration in printing and if the text isn't pure black or is a mix of two or more colours it will go to pot and guaranteed the image is liable to look a lot darker on paper as it is no longer made up of lovely bright light.

After loosing half my hair I decided that the world of commercial printing was somewhere I no longer wanted to be. :mental:

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I was just about to start a new topic on this subject having picked up this months SAM. frankly, it is virtually impossible to read more than two pages in one go as the font is so small.

hopefully Gary Hatcher reads this and takes note of his customers. Keep nagging for bigger print guys by mailing here http://www.scaleaircraftmodelling.co.uk/index.php?EMAIL_QUERY=1

Edited by Red Dot
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As Editor, I once ordered green on brown as a deliberate 'naff' option in a Christmas supplement for an edition of Flypast*, complete with hole in the corner to hang up in your dunny.

It worked a treat.

Trevor

*not FlyPast - the two are related though......

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Not just magazines

As a former draughtsman I still do come across "modern" architectural drawings -most have been reduced drastically in size.

Quite amusing seeing people estimating from them at work or having "meetings" over A1-A4 reduced drawings

in Costa coffee shops on the motorway.

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Noted chaps. As Editor I am, of course, responsible for the finished pages. The designers just do what we tell them - or as often as not simply don't do what we don't tell them.

My own reasons for buying a magazine are that I want something to read, and my priorities as a customer are those elements that I cannot get for free online - chiefly the words and stories. The Internet is a new factor affecting the industry and magazines have changed accordingly. We are no longer the only place to go to look at large pictures of beautiful models...

I have to agree on the subject of coloured type and backgrounds and this has been addressed. I personally have no problem with the font sizes - despite age and decrepitude I have yet to find a font that my reading glasses can't tackle - but shall of course take all comments on board.

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Here's a question for designers/print setters.

If a page has say a photo with light and dark areas over which type is placed, is there a way to automatically adjust the colour of the typeface so that dark type is on a light background and vice versa?

Trevor

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...6pt helvetica thin type set in a black which had been made up of all 4 colours...

Crikey... don't these people ever print out a sanity-check proof???

We have a customer who required I re-write the stylesheet to produce safety manuals in both A5 and A6 formats, with anything up to 23 languages in them. The resulting books weigh in at anything up to 300 pages. In order to get them down to 300 pages, I had to reduce the font size to 4.5pt for most languages, 6pt for Greek and any Cyrillic languages, and 7pt for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Frankly, when they're printed, it looks like a spider's been skating over the pages... it's an illegible mess, but that's what they want.

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Crikey... don't these people ever print out a sanity-check proof???

We have a customer who required I re-write the stylesheet to produce safety manuals in both A5 and A6 formats, with anything up to 23 languages in them. The resulting books weigh in at anything up to 300 pages. In order to get them down to 300 pages, I had to reduce the font size to 4.5pt for most languages, 6pt for Greek and any Cyrillic languages, and 7pt for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Frankly, when they're printed, it looks like a spider's been skating over the pages... it's an illegible mess, but that's what they want.

They are probably required to produce a safety manual, not a safety manual which is legible.

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They are probably required to produce a safety manual, not a safety manual which is legible.

For import to the EU, yes, that's the reason. Their printer must be having conniptions, though, as the resulting PDF is set up to be perfect bound. The end result must be like a very small, dense brick, whose snie cracks the second the manual's opened to be read.

Wish they'd listened to me and output to CD... there's no issue with font size in Acrobat Reader.

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Hi Max, I don't know if there is such a tool now as I have steadfastly avoided going near any kind of design software in the last 8 years since I stopped working in the trade but back then there wasn't and this highlights one of the huge problems I had trying to make clients understand the mechanics of turning their lovingly crafted word document complete with Microsoft clipart etc. into a printable product which meant many more hours of design time.

The image is stored on the computer as a whole lot of coloured pixels each with it's own specific stored colour value but the text is stored as a series of codes for each letter with it's location, font and colour. If you break the text (convert it to a series of vectored graphics) it can no longer be edited as text so any spelling mistakes or changes need to be done on an original copy meaning editing takes a lot longer as you would have to edit the original/convert it to vectors/repeat any other graphic modifications that were done. You could turn the text into an image on a transparent background, overlay this over the image in Photoshop for example then turn it into a mask and "spray" it with suitable contrasting colours but the work involved far outweighs the benefit.

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With 25 years in print, and design - I can sympathise with many of the comments here.

One major problem with designers today is that there is a lack of understanding about typography - even down to basics such as when a serif typeface might be a better choice than a sans serif one. Kerning and Leading seem to be alien to some designers too, as does line length.

Good typography makes things effortlessly readable and comprehensible ( as well as beautiful too). If you've ever read something, and it seemed to be easy to do so, and you understood it, and your eyes weren't tired at the end; odds on it was down to good typography, not just good writing style.

As for running text over images that have light and dark areas: Don't. Just put the caption underneath. Sometimes good design is about simplicity.

Cheers

jonners

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