Viva Brighton Issue #52 June 2017

LOWDOWN ON...
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Printing Viva
Mark Tulley from Gemini explains
The printing officially starts
with our repro team. They’ll
process the files that you’ve
sent over, and then impose
them into the right order so
that when we back up the pages
they back up correctly. The
magazine is A5, but it’s printed
on larger sheets in 32-page sections,
with 16 pages on either
side of each sheet. Our team
check for any potential issues,
but essentially this is done by
the computer.
Once the files have been
processed, we need to
create the printing plates
[templates] for each spread. Colour images are
made up of four colours – CMYK (cyan, magenta,
yellow, black) – so for every colour spread we need
to produce four plates. We need 28 plates in total
for one issue of Viva. The process used to involve
lots of chemicals, but now the
images are burnt onto the plates
using a combination of thermal
and light exposure. It’s a very
environmentally friendly way of
printing. The aluminium plates
are recycled after use.
Viva is printed on one of our
large presses – the Heidelberg
XL press. The clever
thing about this is the colour
control; the colour is recalibrated
every 14 sheets. This
means that as the sheets are
moving through, the computer
is scanning the images to make
sure they’ve got the right
amount of colour in them. If a page is low on, say,
magenta, it automatically pours in more magenta
ink to make sure there’s colour consistency. Before
this technology existed it would have been done
by eye, with one person standing at the end of
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