I recently ran into another pre-press dilemma for one of my newsprint clients. Of course the phone call came in the day after my print deadline, while I was in the eastern Utah backcountry. So there I was, standing on a rock, trying to get enough cell reception for a 5-minute phone call. There wasn’t much I could do 1,000 miles away from my office, but the problem was this:

I often use colored boxes or gradient sidebars with black text on top of them. I find it helps give color to the page, and adds some visual interest to an otherwise monochrome copy space. I had never had a problem with these in the year and a half that I have been designing this particular publication. Yet, the printer informed me that this time the black text was overprinting, causing rich black text in the colored sidebars. Continue reading »