Newsletter archive

Mono, Duo and Tritones

Back in the olden days, when you had to shine a photographic image through a screen onto a piece of photo paper to create a halftone suitable for printing, duotones were invented to add more depth to a photographic image. A black screen would be created and a second screen would be created with a different color ink and different screen angle. This would allow you to reproduce more shades so your image had a larger dynamic range.

Now that screens are generated by page layout programs and editors like Photoshop, the technical need for duotones has been eliminated, but they are still used for their creative effect.

A monotone is a grayscale image with a non-black ink color:

Duotones use two colors. Here’s an example that uses a dark red and a rich yellow:

Tritones and quad tones use three and four colors respectively. Note that a quadtone is not like a 4/c process image since the quadtone recreates the same pixel information four times but at different screen angles. A four color process image separates out the images into CMYK.

We'll talk about four color process next time.

Catalog production

Several of our clients rely on Buster Creative to design and produce great-looking and compelling catalogs. Whether it is functional B2B catalogs or more glamorous consumer catalogs there are critical design and production considerations that make the difference between success and failure. Over the next several newsletters we will address such things as:

• Why a good photo is actually worth more than 1,000 words.
• Why strategic pagination is more important than most think.
• Why a B2B catalog has it’s own design rules.
• How best to incorporate the ordering function with the product.
• What is the optimal way to lower printing & postage costs.
• How to manage for the re-purposing to a digital format.