So, let’s talk about dots
Let me propose a hypothetical situation to you and see if you have experienced it before.
You find yourself working on a client project intended to be produced on screen printed garments, or maybe even flat stock. The client wants it to be cool and trendy, so they only want to print one color. Or maybe they are trying to keep the cost down, so they only want to print one color. Simple, right?
Well, let’s say the client comes back and think the design is too simple, plain, boring, etc… They want to add another color but they don’t want to increase the cost. What’s a designer to do?
Halftones
Halftones, my good friend. Halftones might just be the answer.
For those who are not familiar with the term, halftones are a method of printing a tint of a print color by representing it with small dots – or ellipses, or diamond, or even lines.
So in our scenario, we could add what looks like a second color by using 30% of our ink color as a drop shadow.
The trouble is, the client might end up thinking we are printing a lighter color of orange in the drop shadow.
But…
Let’s say we want to be safe and actually show the client what the halftones will look like once they are printed. How do we go about doing it?
The long way to do it is to copy your design over to Photoshop as greyscale, convert it to a bitmap, set your halftone settings, and then bring it back over to Illustrator to colorize and proof to the customer. You should check with your printer and see what kind of dot they use and what LPI (lines per inch) they prefer. For our purpose here we will use 41lpi. It is a good number to go with unless you are doing high detail (go with a higher lpi for that) or if you need to print on a very coarse mesh screen (go with a low lpi for that).
Change Image to Greyscale
In Photoshop, convert greyscale image to bitmap and choose 41lpi halftones.
Bring the resulting tiff back into Illustrator and colorize it.
Easy enough, right?
This method works great if the design is already approved. If the client hasn’t finalized it yet… Well then you’ll have to do it again if they make any changes.
What Else Could We Do?
If you don’t want to go back and forth every time the client makes edits you could take a look at Illustrator’s pattern fill swatches.
If you take a square of 15% or 30% black into Photoshop and run it through the Bitmap options you could turn that into a pattern swatch in Illustrator.
Then all you have to do when you want to preview halftone patterns for a client is add the pattern to your design.
Easy Peasy
Previewing these patterns directly in Illustrator can help you show the client what their designs will actually look like once they are printed.
Easier Peasier
Now, you could go ahead and set up several of these patterns in a few percentages, and in a couple of resolutions and dot types. Or, you could pick up the Halftone Pattern pack over at Creative Market.
After making a variety of these patterns in our own shop and getting them dialed in we thought would make them available to other designers out there. Let me know what you think!
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