What makes your custom board game printing look ugly? Designers and printing engineers are borne rivals during the custom board game printing. While designers think it to be ugly, the latter thinks it to be ok. WHY?
Since offset-printing-tech was widely used by Heidelberg printing workers, people have had two basic understandings of the source of color: one is the light source color in nature, and the other is the light source color reflected from the surface of an object to the human eye.
RGB color mode is based on the principle of light source color, and offset printing brush with CMYK color mode is based on the principle of reflection color, so that inexperienced board game designers generally get messed up when deciding which color mode:
Board Game Designers: why the board game factory just can’t print the right color as my design?
Board Game Printing Engineers: why does this board game designer think this color is wrong?
This topic has become endless controversy between Card Board Game Designers and Board Game Printing Engineers. Like the craftsmen in Heidelberg, If the board game designers use CMYK ink only on paper design, there will be the above differences.
The worse part is that card board game designers are used to making pictures with computer software. The computer is mostly presented by RGB color principle, which is superimposed three basic light source colors with（Red ，Green and Blue）, directly into the eye, and can be increased or decreased in brightness and contrast through software. In this way, not only can a rich color picture be formed, but also the color saturation is high, which is not easy to distort.
Due to different principles of two colors, so card baord game designers who don’t understand printing techniques may not be able to understand it. For an example of color difference, the four-color printing method cannot reconcile the bright purple presented in the display screen, and it will be hard to achieve the “black” of every black card in the same game due to different batches of printing ink and uneven distribution of machine pressure. To improve this situation, the card board game printing factory had developed a spot-color printing system that differed from CMYK’s: printing ink of a particular color was identified and modulated according to a specified PANTONE color number. This can make the printed color closer to the actual color used by the card board game designer. However, it is not only troublesome to prepare special oil, but also requires cleaning the original oil of the printing machine, so the printing cost is more expensive.
Besides color management, the conflicts between card board game designers and board game manufacturing factories also involves typography in board game printing. There is a saying: color deviation worse your game, terrible die-cut destroy your game. Even though the printing color effect is very good, but a terrible die-cut deviation of the printing board game, making all the efforts in vain. Therefore, in order to make the cutting process as accurate as possible, the board game manufacturing factory will add three auxiliary lines in the layout of the art drawing, so that the cutting effect becomes relatively accurate.
These three auxiliary lines of image from the center inside out are: Margin line, Bleeding line and Die-cut line.
Margin line: generally speaking, in order to prevent the board game cutting technicians from cutting inaccurately and resulting in a sharp cut of the text and design, the card board game designer should set aside a 3mm space in the outer edge of the drawing to draw the margin line, to ensure that the important text or content within the line. However, it is particularly important to point out that when the printed article is too thick, such as when the specification exceeds 32 pages, the margin line should be increased to 6mm to avoid errors.
Die Cut line : die cut line refers to the cut shape of a card or special-shaped paper products. The die cut outward with margin line, which is also the position where the board game cutting technicians makes a cut. When drawing a die cut, the custom board game designer should use a vector image and place it on a separate layer so that it can be hidden from the print output.
Bleeding line: the custom board game designer should draw a 3mm bleeding line according to the shape of the die tangent line. The blank area between the die cut and the bleeding line is the bleed, which is used to accurately make the interval of the cutting graph.
1.The minimum interval between die cut is 6 mm.
2.The tokens can be cut into the desired shape through machine processing, but due to the limitation of technology, the die cutting can not be cut into a very narrow and sharp or complex shape, meanwhile, the more the shape of the cutting die cost will be higher.
In general, circular tokens are attractive and low in cost when matched with excellent art design.
3.A 3mm bleeding space should be reserved outside the die cut line of the drawing.
4.Important text and illustrations should be kept at a margin of 3mm from the die-cut line to avoid being cut.
During the board game design process,obeying principles above the 3 line and make print file under the requirement, so that the board game manufacturing factory can cut the shapes on the printed materials as accurately as possible without too much deviation, thus ensuring your original design of game boards, cards and tokens. Generally speaking, experienced printing manufacturers of board game can control the cutting deviation of the manuscript no more than 1 mm, and top custom board game manufacturers such as WinGo Games can control it at 0.5mm.
Following the above two key requirements is the only solution to make your custom board game printing as satisfied as you can expect.
