February 13, 2012

How to make fine print readable

So, you’ve just purchased that new iMac, iPhone, iPad or any other brand or type of digital device. You’ve just opened the box, and then you saw the legal stuff — the obligations and exonerations the manufacturer agrees to. Unfortunately, if you’re not in any way related to an eagle, you’ll find it hard to read the small font type many of these leaflets are printed with. Here are four ways to make the fine print readable.

Review: Vue Infinite 10

Vue is the 3D application that has been used for box office successes such as Pirates of the Caribbean and Avatar. Vue 10 is the latest version and it includes new features such as stackable render screens, edge-based anti-aliasing, more natural ecosystem animations, etc.

HP chooses X-Rite i1Profiler to create ICC profiles for Scitex wide-format printers

Through the licensing agreement with X-Rite, HP’s support and engineering teams will be equipped with i1Profiler software and i1Pro spectrophotometers to create standard ICC profiles to embed into all HP Scitex printers and to additionally provide their customers with custom ICC profiles needed for their specific wide-format color-critical production environments.

Review: X-Rite i1Publish

ambientlight

X-Rite released its i1Publish range of colour management products as an upgrade to all of its previous software solutions, such as MonacoProfiler and ProfileMaker. The new system is a break with the past, though, and after having tested the software I cannot but conclude it’s not always a successful break at that.

Review: Phantasm CS 2 Publisher

Swap channels

Designers often use Illustrator to create brochures and other n-colour printable media. It is useful and efficiency boosting to see how a design will perform on its output medium, and have the ability to control things like Total Area Coverage (TAC) and separations.

Soft proofing: who delivers the goods?

Soft proofing is about simulating how an image will appear on another device than your monitor — such as a printer — by using only a computer monitor. This can be a helpful tool for making more predictable prints and is perhaps one of the most useful applications of colour management.

Review: Disc Cover 3

Disc Cover

Burning CD, DVD and Blu-Ray discs may soon become a thing of the past, if we are to believe some industry pundits. However, for the time being people still like to get something tangible when they shell out money. They also like to ‘own’ something, without the supplier telling them rightfully or wrongly what they can do with it. And for many people there’s also the drive to collect. What better way to label disc masters and other disc media than with Disc Cover 3?

Review: Barcode Producer 6

Apparent Corporation released the newest version of its flagship barcode creator, Barcode Producer 6. With the new version, Barcode Producer proves it’s the only barcode creation tool that is a perfect fit for graphic and layout designers.

ZebraDesigner Label design software

Zebra Setup Utility

With the Zebra GX430t label printer comes ZebraDesigner, a label design application that runs on Windows XP and Windows 7. Currently, Zebra doesn’t support Mac OS X. The ZebraDesigner software is quite complete, with the exception of support for delimited field files and databases — if you need this functionality, you’ll have to buy ZebraDesigner Pro, a label design software that can also manage RFID tag label printing.

basICColor dragLINK and LINKflow make DeviceLinks easy

ICC DeviceLink profiles contain a colour transformation from an initial device colour space directly into a second device colour space, e.g. from a scanner to a printer. basICColor dragLINK and LINKflow make using DeviceLinks easy and allow users to save time in the process.