Author: Meghan Cordella

Ship As Much As You Want, Wherever You Want

Meghan Cordella3 Comments

Starting today, we are removing the 300-page restriction on MagCloud shipments outside the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. Now, you can ship publications of any size, in any quantity, to any country! Not only that, but we’ve expanded the shipping options available for worldwide destinations, adding faster and more reliable service through FedEx.

You can opt for FedEx International Priority service and have your order in 5 business days from the date of purchase. If you can wait a little longer, you could save some money with FedEx International Economy service and have your order in hand in 7 business days. With both of these FedEx options, we’ll send you a tracking number as soon as the order ships so you can keep an eye on it as it travels from our print facilities to your doorstep, no matter where that is in the world.

One thing to keep in mind with these new larger FedEx shipments is that they may be subject to import taxes, customs duties, and fees imposed by the destination country, which may cause delays beyond our original delivery estimates. Since customs policies vary widely from country to country, we have no control over these charges nor can we predict what they may be, so it will be the responsibility of the recipient to cover any additional charges that may come up. For information on potential taxes and fees specific to your country, we suggest contacting your local customs office, or viewing the applicable FedEx country profile.

If you are willing to wait for your shipment, for orders weighing less than a pound we also have a cheaper shipping option through USPS International First Class Mail. See the table below for a comparison of turnaround times and tracking availability for these new shipping methods.

Costs vary by country and order size. To see the new shipping options available for your country, and what they cost, check out our Price Calculator.

We’re Giving Back Even More of the Back Page

Meghan Cordella34 Comments

Last month, we announced that we were shrinking the label on the back cover to only 1.4” wide, and today we are excited to share that we have taken it a step further. Starting today, all MagCloud print publications will include only a small 6 mm square 2D barcode in the lower righthand corner of the back cover. This barcode allows us to process your order through our printing, binding, and shipping processes as efficiently as possible, while minimizing the impact on your back cover real estate.

For those of you who have been publishing with MagCloud for a while, take a walk down memory lane with this timeline of our ever-shrinking back page label. And as always, let us know what you think!

Make a Big Impression in a Smaller Package

Meghan Cordella3 Comments

Continuing our series on publishing your portfolio through MagCloud, today we take a look at a few design ideas for using the new Digest product to present your work in a more compact format. Digest publications provide the same professional image quality and finishing you’ve always gotten with MagCloud, but with a trim size of 5.25″ wide by 8.25″ tall, they take up only about half the space in your bag. Plus with a cheaper price point (16 cents per page) you can stretch your budget a bit further, and get your work into the hands of even more potential customers.

The question is, how to design within this more constrained space and still highlight your work? To help you get started, we’ve listed a few ideas below…

Use Both Pages

Take full advantage of the available space with images of your work spanning both pages, and bleeding off the trim edges. If you are going to be opting for perfect binding and want to place your images across the spine, be sure to check out our tips for designing for perfect binding.

Highlight One Piece of Work Per Page

Place one image per page to create a kind of photobook. This format is particularly conducive to lookbooks for fashion collections, with each page containing one look.

Combine Images and Text Across a Spread

Make a photo of your work the focus of one page, either with a full bleed or as a contained image, and then include descriptive text on the opposing page. This way each spread focuses on one project, combining both imagery and text to tell the story of each piece of work.

Think Outside Portrait Orientation

Until we are able to offer a true landscape product, show off your work in a landscape format by rotating your content 90 degrees, such that the spine of the publication is on the top edge of the page. If you want to add some practically to your portfolio, and ensure it gets kept around for the coming year, use this rotated format to make a mini calendar, with each month highlighting a different piece of past work.

Create a Themed Booklet with a Segment of Your Work

When photographer Trey Hill learned about our new Digest format, he used it to combine a collection of his images into a photo story called Untouchable. These are images that are included as part of his larger 2010 Photography Annual, but the smaller form factor offers a more focused look at the story this series of photos tells. See for yourself how Trey has used this smaller format to tell his photo story: we’re taking 25% off the production costs on all print orders of Untouchable from now until the end of October.

Have you had a chance to experiment with our new Digest format to create your portfolio? Let us know in the comments what your design strategy has been.

HP MagCloud: Create High-Quality Business Materials on a Small Business Budget

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This post was written by Melissa_Zieger and originally appeared on the blog for 367 Addison Avenue, HP’s online community for small and medium businesses, on September 22, 2011. You can view the original post here.

Did you know that HP has a content publishing web service that can be used to create everything from your own magazine to business materials like catalogs and portfolios? It’s called HP MagCloud – invented by HP Labs, is a self-service publishing platform that allows businesses to easily create into professional-quality publications that can be printed on demand, shipped globally, or distributed digitally.

Better yet, there’s no upfront cost and MagCloud can turn your content from a PDF to delivered printed publication in just three days!

Using MagCloud’s digital storefront, customers can order the latest issue of their favorite publication and have it printed on demand and delivered directly to their doorstep, or download for reading on their digital device of choice. Plus, all content is printed to order using HP Indigo technology, delivering professional print quality with no waste or overruns, reducing the impact on the environment.

Businesses are using MagCloud to create everything from fashion catalogs and knitting guides to photography and architectural portfolios. I recently sat down with two small business customers using HP MagCloud to find out more about how the service is benefiting their business.

Alex Tinsley started her knitting pattern design business, Dull Roar, nearly six years ago. Prior to discovering MagCloud, Tinsley was only able to provide her customers with a PDF of her patterns via her blog. Today, she uses MagCloud to transform PDF versions of her design work into high-quality professional catalogs that she can distribute in both digital and print formats without a huge impact on her business’ bottom line.

“The quality of the printing is really just beautiful, and it’s pretty much the only place you can get that kind of quality in small quantities,” said Tinsley. “I love that it runs without much input from me – I just upload the issues and collect the income. MagCloud handles all the sales, printing and shipping.”

The ability to offer customers both print and digital formats helps Tinsley meet her customer’s needs without making an upfront investment in the creation and printing. Tinsley says that most of her customers prefer the digital copy for instant gratification, but that she uses the hard copies as giveaways and gifts. She’s also used the publication as a handout at tradeshows, which enables her to drive views to her website and increase downloads of her digital catalog.

Trey Hill, a Dallas-based photographer and storyteller, started using MagCloud in 2010 to create storytelling portfolios of his work. He needed a way to not only show the pictures he had shot but also to showcase his journey.

Hill uses Adobe InDesign to create photo portfolios and uses MagCloud to print his digital creations on-demand as a way to attract new business and share with clients as a thank you for their business. Hill says the ability to have both print and digital versions is important. “The print quality increases the value of my business, but we live in a digital world so it’s still important to provide a digital format, as well,” he said. “As a small business owner, not having to buy 1,000 copies to get a great price point is worthwhile. And my customers are blown away by the quality.”

Since using MagCloud, Hill has started to see a change in what his customers have come to expect – they now see him as a storyteller, not just a photographer.

About Alex Tinsley

An avid knitter since 2004 and knit design enthusiast since 2006, Alex Tinsey’s designs can now be seen in publications like Knitty, Knit Simple, the Knit Picks Independent Designer Program, and (soon) Knit Scene. You can access Tinsley’s MagCloud products here.

About Trey Hill

Trey Hill was one of the founding creatives behind I Am Second and his portfolio includes work for Addison Road, Relevant Magazine and the Dallas Stars. He works all over the world and has had the privilege of photographing some of the planet’s most revered and most overlooked people. You can access Hill’s MagCloud products here.

Use MagCloud To Publish Your Portfolio

Meghan Cordella9 Comments

Today we begin a new blog series highlighting some of the great use cases we’ve seen people publish on MagCloud, along with design tips and inspiration to help you create your own publications. First up: portfolios.

On MagCloud we’ve seen portfolios that run the gamut from photography to fashion, architecture to interior design, music to floral arranging. With both print and digital options, uploading your portfolio to MagCloud is an easy way to spread the word about your work across a variety of mediums. With one PDF upload, you can have professionally printed books that you can send ahead or leave behind, as well as downloadable PDFs that can be displayed on any mobile device or computer.

When designing your portfolio PDF for MagCloud, a good starting point are the downloadable instruction packets on our Getting Started page for your software of choice. These step-by-step instructions will help you take your file from document setup to PDF export, and help ensure that your final publication matches MagCloud’s print specifications.

Once your file is set up, the next step is selecting your content. Since the goal of any portfolio is to highlight your work, for many industries, images will be the focal point of your content. When selecting your images, it’s important to remember to choose photos that are high enough resolution for printing, and ensure that your color profiles are embedded in your final PDF. Doing so will ensure the highest quality output of your images in print, setting a good foundation for the rest of your layout.

Which brings us to our next step, placing content in your document. When designing your portfolio layout, it’s good to determine what samples of your work you want to feature and then make that the focal point of each two-page spread. This will ensure that your work stays in the spotlight throughout the publication. If you will be using our perfect bound option, which provides a more professional look and feel with a square binding and thicker cover, don’t forget to check out our design tips for perfect binding when designing your layout to make sure you don’t lose any content into the spine.

We will be providing sources of inspiration throughout the series, but to encourage you to get something in hand to inspire your portfolio design sooner rather than later, we are lowering the production cost on print orders of the following well-designed MagCloud portfolios until the end of October:

“Trey Hill Photography Annual: Issue 1: 2010” by Trey Hill
“California Kitchens Now” by David Duncan Livingston
“James Worrell Photographs: Make Up” by James Worrell

Have you published a portfolio showcasing your work on MagCloud? Share it in the comments below, and let us know what was most important to you when designing the publication. Then, stay tuned to the MagCloud blog as we continue this new series in the coming weeks with more design tips, sources of inspiration, and a few surprises.

Designing For Perfect Binding

Meghan Cordella45 Comments

After you upload your PDF to MagCloud, if it is over 24 pages you will have the option to select perfect binding for your print version. Although MagCloud uses the same PDF for saddle stitch and perfect bound publications, if you plan to choose perfect binding there are a few things that are good to keep in mind while you are designing your PDF.

Content Near The Spine
Saddle stitch binding allows your printed copy to lay flat when it is opened, allowing all content up to the inside edge of your PDF to be visible in the final print copy. Perfect bound publication are glued at the spine which results in approximately a quarter inch of the inside edge of your pages to be less visible because a perfect bound print cannot lie flat without breaking the spine. Therefore, it is good to account for an extra 0.25 inches of margin on the inside edge of your publication when placing text and images on the page, keeping in mind that anything within this 0.25 inches, also referred to as the gutter, may be lost into the spine in the final print.

Images Across Two-Page Spreads
The gutter can be troublesome when you want to place an image across the center spine of your publication. When an image covers two pages, the inside 0.25 inches on both pages will be obscured, which amounts to a half of an inch in the center of the image. This is enough to cause a full person to disappear in a larger group photo, or obscure a subject’s nose in a centered portrait. The best way to account for this is to shift the image outward on both pages so that it is duplicated inside the gutter (shown within the pink lines in the diagram below). Doing so will create the appearance of a continuous image across both pages in spite of the binding.

It’s also a good rule of thumb to avoid centering the focus of your image directly on or near the spine in a perfect bound publication. This disappearing act will be much less obvious if your eye isn’t drawn to it, as shown in the layout on the right versus the one on the left below.

Designing a Spine
Another design aspect to think about with perfect bound publications is the spine. After you upload your PDF to the MagCloud site and select perfect binding, you’ll have the option to pick a color for your spine or upload your own design. In either case, it’s a good idea to pick colors and designs for your spine that are the same or very close to the front and back covers of your publication. Just as the trim of your print copy can vary slightly, so can the placement of the spine, and this will be far more obvious if you have selected a white spine with a dark cover. Choosing a spine color that closely matches your cover or continuing an image from the front or back covers will ensure that your printed publication has a professional appearance every time.

Do you have a good-looking perfect bound publication design that you’d like to show off, or any tips of your own to share? Tell us about it in the comments below!

Working With Color

Meghan Cordella29 Comments

In the world of traditional printing, getting the right color in the right place on the page is something of an art form, done by overlapping layers of ink in just the right quantities using carefully positioned aluminum plates. In a digital world of backlit screens, color is a more technical process, using the spectrum of visible light to produce the desired color output. When these two worlds collide for digital printing, colors must undergo a transition from how they are displayed on screen to what gets printed on the page.

To help you design your MagCloud PDF so that this transition is as accurate as possible, first let’s get back to basics.

RGB vs CMYK
A lot of acronyms get thrown around when you start talking about color, the most common being RGB and CMYK.

RGB stands for Red-Green-Blue, and is an additive color model based on combining red, green and blue light, as shown in the color chart on the left below. RGB is the color model used by most digital devices, including your computer screen and the images produced by your digital camera.

RGB vs CMYK

CMYK stands for Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Key (ie, black), and is a subtractive color model based on layering cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink to selectively subtract the amount of light reflected off the page, as shown in the color chart above right. CMYK is also commonly referred to as 4-color process, and is the color model used for color printing both on traditional presses and on the HP Indigo digital presses used to print MagCloud publications.


From An RGB Monitor To A CMYK Print Copy
When your MagCloud PDF is sent to an HP Indigo digital press for printing, the press will convert any non-CMYK content to CMYK prior to printing. The press does this conversion automatically based on the color profiles that have been embedded in your file. If there are no color profiles embedded in your file, this conversion will be based on the default color settings of the press, which could result in a color output that is different from what you see on screen.

Therefore, to ensure you get the best output possible, we encourage you to follow these color guidelines when creating and inserting content in your MagCloud PDF:

• Images you place into your document, whether from a digital camera or stock photography website, should be left in their original color space (sRGB, Adobe RGB, etc) with the corresponding color profiles embedded in the final PDF.*

• Text and other vector components (ie, backgrounds, blocks of color, etc) that you create in the document should be CMYK, with black text set to 100% K (CMYK = 0, 0, 0, 100).

*For specific information about embedding color profiles in your design program of choice, be sure to check out our Getting Started page.

Have any other color tips to share from your MagCloud publishing experience? Let us know in the comments below!

Get The Most Out Of Your Images

Meghan Cordella19 Comments

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but if that picture is grainy or squished, it’s not going to be saying anything good. To help you include images that speak volumes in your next MagCloud publication, this installment of our Design Blog Series includes a short list of image DOs and DON’Ts:

DON’T use images copied off a website
Aside from the potential copyright issues associated with taking images off of websites, photos used on the web are almost always screen resolution, or 72 pixels per inch (ppi, or more commonly, dpi). This is roughly a quarter of the 300 pixels per inch that is the recommended resolution for printing. If you use an image less than 300 dpi in your MagCloud publication, you run the risk of getting a noticeably pixelated, or ‘fuzzy-looking’ image in the print copy.  The lower the resolution of your image, the more noticeable the pixelation will be, so a 72 dpi image off the internet will look very ‘fuzzy’ in print.

DO use images from your camera or stock photography websites
Images taken with a personal camera or purchased from a stock photography website like iStockphoto will generally be high enough resolution for printing.

An easy way to check if your images are high enough resolution for printing is to open your final PDF and zoom in to 350% on-screen. If an image still looks clear at 350% zoom, like the 300 dpi image on the below left, then this image will look great in your printed copy. If an image looks pixelated at 350%, like the 72 dpi image shown below right, then it will likely look pixelated in your print copy too.

300 dpi vs 72 dpi at 350% zoom

It’s also good to keep in mind that if you double the size of an image, the number of pixels per inch will drop by half. This is because doubling the size of an image doesn’t change the number of pixels in the image, it just increases the number of inches that the pixels have to fill. For example, if you have a 1” x 1” 300 dpi image, which is 300 pixels by 300 pixels, doubling it in size to 2” x 2” means that there are now 300 pixels for every 2 inches, making it a 150 dpi image.

DON’T squish or stretch your images
You have a rectangular photo, let’s say 4” x 6”, but you want it to be square in your MagCloud publication. Sound familiar? One solution would be to just squish or stretch the rectangular image into the square size you want, but here is the inevitable result:

Stretched/Squished Example

DO scale and crop your images
To avoid squishing and stretching the subjects of your photos, the better option is to use scaling and cropping to resize your images. Scaling your images maintains their aspect ratio (the ratio between the width and height of the image), keeping a rectangular image as a rectangle, then the image can be cropped (i.e trimmed) down to the size you want, like so:

Scale/Crop Example

In Adobe InDesign, QuarkXpress, Microsoft Publisher and Apple Pages, you can crop images by creating an image placeholder in the size you want, and then placing your image into the placeholder. These programs allow you to adjust the image independently of the placeholder, and the placeholder will “crop” the image in your final publication. In Microsoft Word and Microsoft Publisher, you can use the Crop Picture feature to manually crop the image itself down to the size that you want. Both methods will help you avoid stretching or squishing your subjects.

DON’T use images that are really dark with low contrast

Your computer screen is brightly back-lit, but unfortunately print publications are not. As a result, details that are dark or low contrast on screen may not be as visible in your printed copy. Overall, you can expect the print you receive to appear darker than what you see on screen, so it’s best to avoid using darker images or those with very low contrast to begin with. If you want to try lightening or increasing the contrast in your images in a photo editing software like Photoshop, check out these photo retouching tips and tricks.

DO embed your color profiles

To get the closest representation in your print copy as compared to what you see on screen, make sure that you embed the original color profiles of your images in the final PDF. We’ll dive more into detail on this next week in a post on color, but in the meantime check out our Getting Started page for downloadable instructions on how to do this in your design program of choice.

We would love to hear your favorite tricks for getting your images to standout. Please post them in the comments section below.

Trim, Bleed and All That Jazz

Meghan Cordella6 Comments

One of the trickiest things about designing for print is understanding trim size and all things related to it.

After the printed pages come off our presses and are bound together, they need to be “trimmed” so that each page is exactly the same size.  This ensures each page in your publication is even, giving it that professional look.

While we always try to trim as accurately as possible, it’s natural for the trim line to vary slightly in one direction or the other, which is why we recommend that you include a “bleed” and work within a “safe zone” when you design your PDF.

Bleed

To ensure that no important parts of the page are cut off in the trimming process a “bleed” area is defined.  The “bleed” extends beyond the “trim” for when you want a photo or color to extend to the edge of the page.  For Standard, Digest, and Digest Landscape publications, the bleed is the top 0.125 inches, the bottom 0.125 inches, and the outside 0.25 inches of your PDF. For Flyer publications, the bleed is the 0.125 inches on all sides of the 8.5″ x 11″ PDF.

The reason to include a bleed in print files is to ensure that images you want to go to the edge of the page always do so, regardless of how exact the trim is.  If an image is cropped at the 8.25” x 10.75” trim edge on a Standard size publications, as shown in the below diagram on the left, and the print is trimmed slightly wider, then there will be a white bar between the printed image and the edge of the page.  If the image is extended all the way to the 8.5” x 11” PDF edge instead, filling the bleed area as shown in the below diagram on the right, then the printed image will go all the way to the edge of the page regardless of where the actual trim occurs.

Safe Zone

The “safe zone” is the area inside the trim line where your text and graphics are not at risk of being cut off or lost into the binding in the final print, regardless of any variation in the trim.  For MagCloud publications this area is 0.25 inches within all sides of the trim edge.

Any content that you want to appear completely within the final printed publication should be kept inside the safe zone.  Placing content too close to the top, bottom or outside edge of the PDF could result in that content being cut off during trimming.  This is something to keep in mind when adding page numbers to your publication, as those tend to be placed closer to the page edge.  Similarly, placing content too close to the inside edge of the PDF could result in that content being lost into the binding if your publication is perfect bound.  By keeping your content within the safe zone, you ensure that it will appear completely in the final print and digital copies of your publication.

For more information and step-by-step instructions to set up your PDF with the bleed and safe zone in mind be sure to check out our Getting Started page.

Next up in the MagCloud Design series: The Importance of Layouts and Templates