Contemplating from afar

To continue the series of article, I will deal here with the layout of artbooks and the ink used for printing. While I wrote this article a few weeks ago, I added a paragraph for the page layout and the C77 provided me with some visual example for printing sample.

For books layout, this is normally a job left for the publisher who have to send then the PDF file to the printer. For doujinshi I will guess that it’s the artists themselves who are doing the job. For such job, publisher normally use DTP softwhare ( Desktop Publishing ) like Adobe inDesign, or Quark Xpress, depending of their computer environment. Layout in artbook can be quite different between them, but I will distinguish two cases, one where they put the illustration as large as possible, and then another with small illustrations.

Illustrations taking whole pages, were from the beginning prepared for printing; they can be on one page, or spread on 2 pages. The later case must have certainly annoyed a lot of people. Why can’t they just rotate the image to put it sideway. I’m not sure myself, but I will guess that turning a book is a taboo. Nevertheless, they should normally take into account the thickness of the artbook especially for glue binding which usually eat a part of the image; but in most case I have seen they will print on the full page.

Here is a normal page layout. As you can see, there are plenty of margin; as a normal book will look bad without them. The best layout would have even more margin than this but artbooks usually doesn’t waste that much space. Most of them remove the margin, even the outside one for thumbs and notes. This margin is convenient so as to to not put fingers on the illustration, but I guess everyone are careful with their artbooks and flip the pages with just the border. The inside margin is here to take into account the eaten part but artbooks spread the illustration in there. In fact in the DTP software it’s pretty simple, you put the illustration in the middle of the double page layout and you get your 2 page spread illustration with the binding in the middle. I will admit that margin would certainly kill the illustration, but it seems that some people do take this into account, and in fact make overlapping pages. While there is still a part of the illustration eaten, visually it will be less apparent as the binding is compensated by the overlapping.

Now we can get onto the printing, and sadly, there are still color problem there. Getting an image in CMYK will not guarantee the quality of the color. The problem here lies in the different ink used. First of all, it’s normal for an artist to preview their art on paper, and they have a very good inkjet printer for that job. Inkjet printer aren’t for intensive printing, so they use liquid ink, which have a very good color restitution. It will be rather faithful to the screen. However, the ink used by professional printer are different. It’s a paste ink, used for offset printing ( most common printing method as it’s cheap for mass good quality printing ). The difference of the ink can change how an artwork looks.

Here are sample of Noizi Ito’s first and second artbook, GU-RE-N, and KA-E-N. GU-RE-N has always been a deceiving artbook for me compared to KA-E-N. The difference are in the color; GU-RE-N just looks bland, compared to KA-E-N which has the nice and vivid color of Noizi Ito’s style. The problem here is not between the RGB and CMYK space, since the illustration of Shana were for printing already, and actually looks good in the light novel. This is just a problem of quality check on the printing, but the one who signed the “Good to Print”, mustn’t have checked the quality of the color. These sort of issue needs to discussed with the printer so as to solve them.

On the photo provided by Tinkle for their C77 sets, you can see stripes in cyan, magenta, yellow and black, meaning that the sheet here is just for checking purpose. It’s not cut yet in small cards as well. Printers will always provide such sample to their client so as to check the quality of the printing before mass printing them. I will also note that since C75, Tinkle, with a few other artist, has the best printing quality I have ever seen in all my doujinshi, but I should cover this in the last article.