Week 5: Type and Color

Week 5: Type and Color

Assignment

Throughout the second half of this course, you will be preparing a number of marketing pieces for an imaginary restaurant. 

This week you will develop your restaurant company overview and design a logo.
In week 6, you will create business card, letterhead and envelope designs for the restaurant.
In week 7, you will create menu and take-out box designs for the restaurant.
In week 8, you will begin a Graphic Standards Manual for the restaurant.


For your Final Project, you will be collecting your marketing design items into a document called Kit of Parts (a complete branding design package.) You will also be finalizing your Graphic Standards Manual.

Create a Restaurant

Create an imaginary restaurant which has a single location in midtown or downtown Sacramento. It can serve any kind of food. Create a name for it that is memorable but not cliché.

Develop a Company Overview

In a Microsoft Word document, write up a company overview for your restaurant which answers the following questions. Please write your profile in complete sentences and in paragraph form. Spelling and grammar count!
Do not repeat the questions in your document, and do not merely answer the questions. Use your answers to develop an overview which is compelling and appetizing. Work as if you were presenting this document to potential investors (if the investors like your work, they will lend money to the restaurant, which can then afford to retain you as a designer.)

Company Basics

• What is the restaurant's name?
• What kind of food does it serve?
• Who are the restaurant's main (real) competitors?
• What is the restaurant's (fake) address and phone number?
• Who is the restaurant's manager?
• What is the price range for a typical dinner?

Company Branding

• Who are your target clients (diners)? Be more specific than "everybody".
  • What kind of people are they?
  • Where are they located?
  • What would you like them to think about your brand?
  • How will you attract them to your restaurant?
• What will the atmosphere of the restaurant be?
• What sorts of colors would be appropriate for the restaurant's marketing materials?
• What will the restaurant's brand message be? In other words, what promise will your marketing make to potential customers about their experience with your restaurant?

Design a Logo

Using the restaurant and company overview you developed above, design a logo which captures the personality and essence of the restaurant's atmosphere and food.
I recommend you begin with 20, 30, or more sketches on paper. This way, you can rule out lots of bad ideas and select the best idea you have (we all have lots of bad ideas that we need to get out of our system when developing a design.)
Create the logo using only vector drawings in Illustrator. Do not use any raster elements. Create Outlines of any fonts that may be used. Save the file as an EPS. 

Avoid:

• anything highly detailed
• clichéd elements, unless presented in a fresh way
• gradients
• any process color other than Process Black
• any RGB elements

Final Project Overview

Take a few minutes to review the requirements for the Final Project.

Avoiding Printing Pitfalls

Using Spot Colors in Illustrator

The Adobe Illustrator software manual may not give the industry specific instructions a screen-printer needs to prepare a graphics file for spot color creation, separation and output, but the great news is the program has everything you need to get the job done easily and accurately.

Are you changing all of your colors to black just to output files? You’re wasting valuable time. Read on to learn how friendly spot colors are to a screen-printer and how to increase your job turnaround rate while reducing costly downtime.

Not every color is a spot color. Consider this color:

It may look like a spot color but it is actually made up of a mixture of cyan (72.55%) and magenta (38.04%), making it a process color for four-color process printing. As it is now, you can’t output this process blue color as one spot color to a single sheet of film. Upon output, two films (cyan and magenta), will print and they will also be made of halftones requiring process inks and not a specific solid color.

This blue is a true spot color which was custom named “Blue Spot Color.”

When a color is a spot color, the swatch in the Swatches palette will have a unique appearance. Work with spot colors when you are not creating a four-color process job.

The symbol below represents a spot color when working in Adobe Illustrator. CorelDraw uses a similar symbol to represent spot colors.

You can easily convert process colors to screen-print friendly spot colors. Double-click any process color swatch in the Swatches palette. It will open the Swatch Options window.

Simply change the Color Type from Process to Spot Color. You can rename your swatch, too.

The color mode (CMYK, RGB, LAB) does not matter, making spot colors so user friendly. Once converted they are ready to use. You can also import a swatch library of spot colors such as a PANTONE solid coated. See the Adobe User Manual or Adobe Help Menu for additional info.

Spot colors print clean and sharp, and only create halftones when tinted, shaded, faded or used as a gradient (blend). Other than that, all spot colors, regardless of their actual color on screen, will output as solid black to your film when at 100% tint.

To output spot separations, choose Print. Go to the Output option. From the Output pop-down menu select Separations (default is Composite). Note the spot colors in your file.

Be sure to make your own registration marks because Illustrator’s registration marks are not big or bold enough for screen-printers. From the Illustrator art file, custom create registration marks and color them with the swatch palette color registration (looks like a registration mark). Elements automatically and universally print on every spot color film output.

Selecting and Using Selected Pantone Colors

Scenario: As a designer, you will be required to use Pantone colors to create spot-color documents for multi-color print projects.

About Pantone Colors

When producing spot color files (which use specified ink colors other than CMYK) each color is selected from the Pantone swatch library. Each Pantone ink color is numbered. The commercial printer uses a specified mixing formula for each Pantone color to ensure accurate color matching. 

How to add Pantone swatches in Illustrator:

Step 1. Remove the default color from the Swatch window..

• With the Illustrator document open, Choose Window>Swatches.
• The default settings for the swatch window include color swatches that are composed of CMYK colors.
  
  
  
  These color should be removed befor adding Pantone colors.
  Note: Production designers always should remove unnecessary colors before sending out job files.
• To remove unnecessary colors, first choose Select All Unused from the swatch window options.
  
  
• With the swatches selected, choose Delete Swatch from the swatch window options.
  
  
  
  
  Usually some swatches remain undeleted.
  
  
  
  
  To delete the remaining swatches, select each manuallyand click on the trash icon at the bottom righ corner of the window
• To add Pantone colors, choose Window>Swatch Libraries>Color Books>. In the pop-up menu select the appropriate Pantone swatch library.
  
  
  
  color to add it to the swatch window.