Pete Rivard, Principal Instructor for Digital Imaging, Dunwoody College of Technology in Minneapolis, MN joins hosts Scott Sheppard & Gene Gable to discuss designing for flexography and packaging. Pete explains that in 1914, Dunwoody College was founded by the folks who also began General Mills and has enjoyed a close relationship with the packaging industry as one of the nation’s key technical resource for print education. Pete also discusses some key points of what makes designing for flexographic printing processes so uniquely exciting, and different from traditional offset processes.

He also discusses details of their technical curriculum for flexographic printing, prepress, and design. Pete shares some insights on the overall process of flexo and package printing, which unlike other processes include finishing the piece, bag, box, label within the press run. Designing the page layout needs to consider these factors, as do the variety of substrates available which are used in package design. Package designers often use 3D tools to help visualize final printed boxes or other pieces to better understand the overall folding configuration which need to be addressed in the final print file. He also details the differences between flexo and gravure printing.

Packaging and flexographic printing are one of the major growth areas for designers available in the print industry today, find out more about Dunwoody’s courses at: http://www.dunwoody.edu/graphics/

Design News of the Week with Jay Nelson

This week’s Jay shares the results of the Pantone Color of the Year for 2009: PANTONE 14-0848 Mimosa established annually by the Pantone Color Institute. He also discusses Google’s new archive of Life Magazine’s Photo Archive that makes millions of their images searchable and available for reference dating back to 1750′s. Jay also explains the Copyright Clearance Center’s ReadyImages Service that provides easy access to a large collection of images having only to pay a small annual fee. Find out more at http://www.copyright.com

For more on Jay Nelson and his Design Tools topics visit: http://www.design-tools.com

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