I like type. I think it's a beautiful art form worthy of close observation and study. I take this position not just from an aesthetic sensibility but from a practical marketing outlook. Type, if well chosen, can convey meaning or elicit emotion. It can inspire and persuade.
How many of you, as children, cut a potato in half, cut a design into one half of the potato, and then inked up the relief image you had just carved and pressed it onto paper? That's printing. Even though it bears little resemblance to the five- and six-color presses in a commercial printing shop, it's still printing. (Actually, as a relief process, it bears more of a resemblance to letterpress.)
There are a number of reasons to coat the cover paper of a perfect-bound print book, or the dust jacket of a case bound book, or even a poster, but the primary ones involve appearance and durability. If you want the print book, for instance, to endure heavy use or last a long time (or if you want to protect heavy ink coverage from fingerprinting), consider coating the sheet. Or, if you want to contrast various dull or gloss effects against one another to highlight the printed images, you may also want to add an additional coating.
Don't try this at home. No, really. You'll wind up spending more money, and you probably won't be happy with the results.
I've been working with a client to prepare a color swatch book for press (a small print book of single pages attached with a metal screw and post assembly, with color on the front of each page and black text on the back).
When I was a boy, we had milk bottles delivered to our door. Glass bottles. Boy, have things changed. Now, beverages are just as likely to come in boxes or pouches with straws.
These containers fit into a particular segment of the package printing industry called “flexible packaging.” A PowerPoint series I found by Peter Schottland, produced for the American Packaging Corporation, called “An Overview of the Flexible Packaging Industry,” defines flexible packaging as:
I had to install a window static cling in a theater last night. Ironically, it was only 8.5” x 11” in size, the dimensions of a sheet of letterhead. Given all the standees I've installed with my fiancee, from a 15-foot, multi-level dinosaur that reached the tiles of the theater's suspended ceiling (and even lifted one tile up slightly) to the giant beach ball for the movie Rio, I'm used to large standee and banner installations. This was very small. It was to be installed in the ticket window.