“One thing I keep seeing is “template” downloads. What are the templates for?”
Templates are to keep a consistent look. Letterers use templates in different ways; most include at least a standard bounding box to place the art and crop marks to ensure all final pages are the same shape and size and guidelines to show the lettering boundary and the trim so you don’t lose lettering (or art) during the printing process.
More advanced (and complicated ones) will include several premade balloons, tails, multiple font selections (already formatted) and more that can simply be dragged and dropped (ALT-DRAG) where you need them (these are also usually on their own layers…it makes everything nice and clean). Templates also help you keep book-specific caption boxes and styles all in one place so you don’t have to go searching for a character’s internal dialog style (“red sentence case font in a blue box with a 2pt drop-shadow”) that you haven’t used in three issues because it’s already there just waiting for you to grab it. A good template can speed up the lettering process three to four times (or more). Make yourself a good template at the beginning of every project and it will be your friend.
“My pages are scanned at 300 dpi originally 11×15 roughly (and I stress roughly). On some of your posts you advise certain sizes for bleed, trim and work area. How do I get my original art to the correct size to use for lettering?”
What follows is for people who are GOING TO RESIZE, if you don’t want to resize or your editor doesn’t want you to (they’re the boss) then this walk-through is not for you.
Ten years ago I would have said that you should ALWAYS letter on the original art-board size and leave the resizing to the paste-up guys when they Quark the book. Today, I won’t say that because graphics and printing techniques have come quite a ways and lettering to the right size, I believe, gives a better product since you can see your lettering at printed size. Better still, this will drop the burden on your computer a LOT because small art means smaller files…which is ALWAYS a good thing!
Resizing of ALL artwork for a project is usually best done at the very beginning to get it out of the way. Here are three ways to do it.
1. 3. Tell the colorist/editor what size you need and have her do it. Above and beyond coloring the pages, the colorist is the manipulator on any art team and does the most to make the art printer ready. When the colorist makes their final version it is nothing for them to export to the correct size for lettering and I have never met a colorist not willing to do it. However, I’ve met several colorists (all very new and usually unpublished) who don’t know how to do it/do it correctly…so this may not be the best option for you if you want the book to look correct.
2. 2. Resize them in Photoshop (I use CS2, please check your commands to make sure they work with whatever version/software you are using).
a. Artist are usually very consistent and without too much effort at all a page can be resized to the right dimensions. If a scanned page is 11×17 at 300dpi, open IMAGE>IMAGE SIZE and enter 62.52% in the WIDTH box (percent is on the dropdown menu)…HEIGHT will typically be changed to 62.52% (sometimes 62.51%…let’s not quibble) automatically, if not put it there too.
b. Make sure the SCALE STYLES, CONSTRAIN PROPORTIONS, and RESAMPLE IMAGES (BICUBIC) are all checked.
c. For resolution leave it at 300dpi…OR you can now (and NOW ONLY, not later in the process and NEVER in Illustrator) up it to 400dpi and gain the resolution because you are shrinking the image. RULE OF THUMB: If you have scanned at any other resolution you can increase your dpi by 1/3 during the resizing of the art.
d. This resized art is now EXACTLY the right width and SLIGHTLY longer than a typical comic page. Assuming you have your crop and trim correctly placed in your template (which you do, because you’re going to use a template, right?) this will become the EXACT dimensions when you export the final product from Illustrator (usually in TIFF or EPS).
e. As I said above, Artists are USUALLY consistent. Sometimes you may have to adjust the resizing of the page in order to letter it correctly. As a rule (which gets broken all the time), you want the panel boarders to ride the LETTERING BOUNDARY (LIVE AREA) exactly (6.125”x9.687”). If an artist tends to draw without ruling his pages (“Bad! Bad artist!”) or (worse) ignores the rules, you’re going to have to make the adjustments on the fly so the art and lettering doesn’t get cut off in the trim. If you can’t do this easily (i.e. shrinking the art to 67% or 58%) you should go back to the artist/editor and address the problem…there may be a reason for the art being off (bad scanning is often the culprit) or the artist was trying to get too stylized for his own good (sigh.). Communicating with your teammates is the secret to getting this resolved quickly and easily.
f. Many companies still ask for the lettering on a transparent layer (in EPS format). If you have resized the art, you MUST provide them with the new art or they will never get it to align with your letters when they merge them in Quark. This is less and less of an issue as more publishing companies are using highres TIFFs (which you will be exporting, so no one has to worry other than you), but PLEASE save yourself a world of hurt and check with your editor if you’re not sure.
3. 2. Until recently (ADOBE CS) resizing the art in Illustrator was never a good idea. To be honest, I still don’t suggest it has inconsistent results (no longer blurring…they seem to have fixed that problem…but if you don’t resize each page EXACTLY the same (even .5% is too much difference), the art can look off to the reader). HOWEVER, if for some reason you INSIST on doing it this way, here’s how to get the best result.
a. Load the art into Illustrator and center it on the screen. Pull up the ALIGN window (SHIFT-F7), click on the arrow in the right corner, and make sure ALIGN TO ART BOARD is checked.
b. Click the buttons on ALIGN Objects for vertical and horizontal centering. This will put the art EXACTLY in the middle of the page (as defined by the art board, so make sure your artboard, AND CROP MARKS, are set to 6.875”x10.437” as any good template will be).
c. While holding SHIFT and ALT down, drag the art to the right size…this will keep it centered and proportioned.
d. COOL TRICK: After you have resized ONE page perfectly, pull up your LINKS window (WINDOW > LINKS), select the art on the LINKS list, click the upper right arrow and select RELINK (or press the RELINK button at the bottom of the window), a new window will pop up with a directory (hopefully (though not always) your art directory, select the new art file and hit PLACE. This will replace the art AT THE SAME SIZE. If your artist is consistent, you can do this for every page (save each one under a different filename of course) and save yourself a lot of heartache.
e. This technique DOES work for a lot of art (especially short books), but you will not be able to export it to a transparent EPS (used less and less fortunately since hi-res TIFFs are now very good) because the paste-up guys will NEVER get the art resized the same way you did. PLEASE make sure you know how the publisher wants the final product from you before doing it this way.
Per request, this is will be the first of several walkthroughs. These are in no way complete or exclusively correct…there may be other ways to do it and I look forward to discussions on techniques.
The trick to a novelty is for it to keep reinventing itself or its purpose to keep it fresh. Sadly, this is something which once the novelty wears off is not going anywhere and the people who are counting on it for jobs and livelihood (read: the Hualapai Tribe) are going to have their asses handed to them on a long-glass platter while the financiers (who will certainly be taking their cut early and often) move on to the next big thing.