by Allana Mayer
In the last post, I told you that I had started a print-on-demand shop with designs I sourced from the public domain. In this post, I’ll talk about some of the graphic-design steps you’ll need to take to create your own.
The Designs
If you decide that a print-on-demand shop is right for you, your first step is to ensure that you’re using images that you have the right to modify and profit from. The public domain is great for that; be sure to check with your library staff and even your copyright officers if you aren’t certain. Archival materials will often be governed by donation contracts, and contract law can supersede copyright. If you’re reprinting a 14th-century manuscript page, of course, you’re probably in the clear.
If you’re doing like I did, and working from digitized materials available online, be sure you’ve got your dates right. I chose a book from 1897, whose author died in 1900. On my shop’s “About” page you’ll see I’ve listed a few of the many illustrators credited in the book; I looked each up to see if their works would be in the public domain. I suggest you do the same.
On the Internet Archive, you can download an entire package of scanned pages in one big ZIP file. For the book I chose, it was almost a gigabyte of images.
Taking a page image and isolating only the black ink (as well as removing the beige paper, specks of dirt, discoloration and shadows from the light angle, etc.), then hand-editing spots where ink has faded or the image is cut off — it isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s not a particularly artistic process, but it does take patience and some subtlety. I follow what I colloquially call “the ugly logo guide” in my head.
The process is a bit more finicky for digitized rare books, and there are a few extra tools you should know about:
- If you don’t want to spend ages hand-selecting every bit of off-white that didn’t get turned transparent, use the Select Color option and fiddle with it until it seems to have selected everything that isn’t black.
- Editing parts of ink that got faded or flaked away is best done with the Clone tool.
- Use the burn tool to darken the caption text – trust me, thicker text is important.
When I opened the Ridpath book’s images up, I discovered that the images weren’t exactly preservation-quality; the photos are 72dpi and only about 2000×3000 pixels. It would have been impossible to get larger prints than 10×10 inches without showing pixellization, so the images have to be vectorized. This process essentially takes any input (commonly a person’s hand-drawn sketches) and calculates its lines’ trajectories relevant to each other. Then it can be stretched and re-rendered without any loss of quality.
The image as it appears when you open it in Illustrator
I use Adobe Illustrator for this part; the “Live Trace” function does the job pretty quickly. You can trace the image into pure black and white, greyscale with anywhere from 3 to 100 grays, or a color image of up to 30 shades. I’d suggest following this guide. Remember to “ignore white” if your image is going to have transparency around its edges.
The image, traced at default settings in black-and-white.
For this image, I found that the black-and-white version was really striking! But I chose instead to make a more granular greyscale image in line with existing designs.
The image, traced using my settings.
I’m more comfortable with Photoshop, so I took the vectorized EPS file and opened it back up in Photoshop. (There are likely other ways to do this!) When you open the file, it’ll bring up a window so you can convert it to 300dpi and RGB (Society6’s requirements for high-quality printing). You don’t really need an image larger than 10,000 pixels on the long side for any of Society6’s products, so depending on how much whitespace your image has, you can guesstimate the right rendering size (I usually go with 15,000 pixels, to give me some room to move.)
The box brought up when you open your Illustrator file in Photoshop.
You may want to do a bit more editing at this stage – you can change the colors, do another check for bits of white where it should be transparent, or add in color where you don’t want it transparent (as I did with the cave bear skull, by just selecting the shape of the skull and filling it in with a blueish-white).
The image, after I’ve colored in the bone bits.
From there, it’s all canvas size, image resize, and occasionally some cutting-and-pasting into separate layers to reconfigure portions of the image, such as the caption. You can see an example in the difference between the stages of cell division in the coffee mugs, the shirts, and the laptop skins.
Society6 gives you specific dimensions for different products (t-shirt designs are transparent PNGs at 3300×5100; pillows and totes are 6500×6500 JPGs), so it can be irritating to finagle everything from portrait to landscape as needed. All-over designs are easier to work with (as in my glacier and mountain designs), while designs like my skeleton really just need to be centred with lots of whitespace.
In the next part, I’ll telll you about the workings of the print-on-demand platform I chose (and some others I didn’t).
Check it out online:
- The shop: http://ift.tt/1Uew7JB
- This shop is a fundraiser for the Society of American Archivists Foundation’s Mosaic Scholarship.
- It uses images from the public domain, found on the Internet Archive.
- Check out all of Allana’s posts here.
from Library as Incubator Project http://ift.tt/1SJ6wrj
via IFTTThttp://ift.tt/24ma2iI
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