4 Color Process with Foil Report

feel good vitamins

We randomly chose a product under several categories in GC 4060: Packaging and Specialty Printing. From the pile, I picked up vitamins under the healthcare group. From the product we picked up, we had to research and design a brand for our product. I chose to name my brand, Feel Good Vitamins. From there, there were many projects we had to print based on our brand. This project is based on the 4 color process with foil. Read along and see my process in developing this project.

Art Considerations/Theme

My brand, Feel Good Vitamins, has a target audience of young people, like teens and adults ages 16-30, for all genders. When designing the promotional sticker for this project, I wanted to go more towards something cute and incorporate the face into the sticker. While making my picked thumbnail in Illustrator, I realized I wasn’t entirely satisfied with what I made, and it did not fit my brand theme as much. The packaging of this brand is more minimalistic, and I needed to go more towards this route for promotional stickers.

Thumbnails

These were the thumbnails for my promotional stickers. In the beginning, I wasn’t sure what to do and included all of the sketches of the face of my logo. As you see, I still incorporated the face along the process, but I also had the icons I made for my packaging.

Proof

For my first proof, I went with the thumbnail I thought looked best out of the four I had done. It was okay, but I was not exactly proud of it. For my second proof, I incorporated the icons I used for my packaging and turned the icons and text into foil; red is foil. When I got the criticism for this, I needed to incorporate more colors. It looked more like the three-spot color project than the four-process colors. Mrs. Fox pointed me in the direction of my final proof. I incorporated my icons again and changed the colors associated with them. This is the file I went through to combine them in prepress. While trapping all the colors and seeing the overprint preview illustrator, the colors looked slightly blended (it’s more evident on the file and pdf than the exported .jpg). I asked my T.A. Max if I should subtract the icons from the solid background so the color would pop in production. He suggested trying that out in 2/4 stickers and seeing what it would look like in a hard proof. The cut-out proof compared to the final proof looked the same. Because the proof looked the same, I chose not to cut out the rest of the icon from the solid background and left it as is.

Prepress

For prepress, this would combine all three groupmates’ files into one file to output onto a plate. This was combined using Illustrator and artpro. This is the result of that.

Plate Making

  1. Back exposure
    1. Place in exposure unit with the back side (without peel) facing upward for 85 seconds
    2. Once done, take to CDI spark 2530 imager
  2. 2.1 Imaging
    1. Imprints image into the plate
    2. Peel side facing up; remove peel quickly
    3. Open cover of Imager
    4. When loading the plate into the drum, aline far left corner up to 30 mm
    5. Once lined up, use the wrench on the top right to open the clamp and rotate the drum so that it clamps the plate
    6. Turn on vacuum
    7. Rotate the drum slowly so that it picks up the plate
    8. Take the wrench and open the bottom right clamp so that it clamps all 4 corners
    9. Make sure there are no bubbles and that all 4 corners are clamped
    10. Close imager
  3. Go to the computer to set up the imaging
    1. Merger
      1. To put files into the merger, open RIP output, drag and drop each color separation into Merger
      2. Select one at a time and drag them onto plate; give yourself space around one another
      3. Click ‘other’ drop-down tab; select DFR 1.7 (067)
      4. Click ‘expose’ on the far right
      5. Title file and save; automatically saves into the exposure tab
    2. Exposure
      1. Set position to 30mm
      2. Hit start
      3. Runs for about 16 minutes; Make sure to check the plate every 5 minutes – make sure the light is green and the timer is still running
    3. View
      1. Uses LEN files created in ArtPro
  4. 2.2 Imaging
    1. Take the plate out using the same methods we placed it with
      1. Unclamp the plate and roll the drum so that the plate slides so you can see
    2. Close imaging unit
    3. Merger -> file ->remove all positioned items
    4. Go back to exposure and reset position so that the next person is set up
  5. Face exposure
    1. Take the plate out of the imager and place it back in the Cyrel Fast exposing unit with face facing up
    2. Select 6 to begin the exposure process. Exposes for 6 minutes
    3. Open the machine and take the plate to Cyrel Fast 1000 TD
  6. Thermal developing
    1. Uses heat to remove unexposed photopolymer on the plate that is not part of the image
    2. Hit F4 -> plate type will pop up -> hit the arrow, it will ask how many revolutions – 10 revolutions  -> click F4 again -> thickness – 30 inches > click F4
    3. F3 to open clamp -> slide plate in, make sure each corner has its own clamp -> click F3 to close
    4. Click F4 to start revolutions
    5. Takes about 12 minutes for 10 revolutions
    6. Once done, grab your plate.
    7. click F1 to acknowledge that you grabbed your plate
  7. Final exposure
    1. Place plate in top red drawer – face up
    2. Click 2, then 4
  8. Cut plates
    1. First, cut out the plates using scissors 
    2. Use the blade to trim off strips and cut each template
    3. Use a larger blade – on top and bottom: cut off at the very tip of the bearer bar

Make Ready

This was printed in black, cyan, magenta, yellow, and then foil of that order. The substrate was on a continuous roll of paper. The plate was mounted on the plate cylinders and moved onto the press.

Press Work

The 4-color process was printed on the Nilpeter. We could not have a die cut for our group’s run as that would make our group run past lab hours. When our group registered, we would move the arrows on the iPad on the press to adjust left, right, up, or down to make it perfect. It took a few tries on each color and foil to line it up right.

Quality Control & Anaylysis

My artwork looks close to the design on my screen, especially the overprint preview. This is because when it prints on the press, all the process colors overlap on top of the solid teal color. I would change the icons of my design to look more bright. It looks dulled out on print because the icons are printed on top of solid ink instead of the white substrate. If I were to redesign it, I would remove the shape of the icons on my solid and increase the stroke of the solid color or icons to decrease the error of white showing in between if it was not perfectly registered. The metering system did influence the press run. At the beginning stage, after we put our plate cylinders on the press, it moved down to print on the substrate. The metering system has ink, so if there was too much ink, it would smudge, or too little, it would not print consistently. There had to be enough gap from the metering system to the cylinder to print enough ink. At the beginning of printing, there was not enough ink on the substrate; as the press ran, we decreased the gap to increase the ink coverage. We had to ensure our plate was evenly impressed onto the substrate, or the colors could be too dark or light. We also had to adjust the impression of the plate to have the correct registration, or else the four process colors and foil don’t overlap on the registration marks, it looks off. I know if the recreation was well executed from how close it was to the hard proof. For my design, the hard proof had the vibrant colors of the icons on top of the solid colors. The icon colors were dulled out on the final product since it printed on top of the solid color. I executed well enough where I am satisfied, but if it were to be a big corporation, they would be more strict about color accuracy.

Results