Let me tell you right now, this project was a serious learning experience! The entire project wound up being my sole responsibility when the other designer working on it unexpectedly dropped the ball.
The last time I had done any sort of page layout was way the hell back in high school. (I graduated HS in 1993 if that tells you anything.) It was a different world back then, but fortunately digital prepress hasn't changed too much since then. If anything, with the advent of PDFs, it's gotten a hell of a lot easier.
Anyway, I haven't done any design for print in quite a while. Designing for print is a very different beastie compared to designing for the web. The number one issue is color space. Coputer monitors display color differently than ink on paper. Plus, the color black is particularly feisty. When working in RGB (web color), and then converting to CMYK (print color), all the stuff in black (usually text) gets converted to a mixture of all four print colors: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Well, that is just hell for a printer, who would have to align all four printing plates to match up the colors to create black text. So it's hella easier to set all the black to 100% K so there's no mixing. It's just plain old solid black. Solid. (And then there's overprints, but that's for another day.)
It was a great learning experience for me. As crazy as it was to get this thing done all by myself in such a crunch of time, I'm looking forward to working on the next one!
Did I ever tell all y'all I love my job?
