Shoto Press earned a reputation for high production values and unusual printing techniques with Garlands of Moonlight, which was printed in a black and metallic silver duotone using high-definition imaging. In the case of The Golden Vine, we've taken the production philosophy behind Garlands several steps further into glorious color.

Warning: the following information is highly technical and contains a number of large images. Those who are not intensely fascinated with production details or have slow Internet connections are strongly cautioned.

Artwork was drawn at 120% of actual size. All finished linework was scanned at 1200dpi. Linework was reduced to 300dpi for coloring; colored files (with linework stripped out) were interpolated up to 600dpi and combined with 600dpi linework reduced from the original master 1200dpi linework scans.

Files were colored in CMYK mode using a swatch set provided by the printer for reference colors. Coloring for the two visual styles with gold ink was handled through the addition of a spot ink channel for the gold.

All design, prepress, and production was done using Adobe software: Photoshop for coloring and image editing, Illustrator for design elements, InDesign for layout, and Acrobat for the creation of PDFs.

Matte coated paper was chosen for the paper stock. The cover is finished with a matte laminate.

The following typefaces were used:

• Adobe Myriad (roman, italic, bold, bold italic)
• Linotype Deca Display
• Bitstream Thesis SSK (roman, italic)
• Blambot Zud Juice (lettering typeface; regular and italic) designed by Nate Piekos

A crash course on printing: the press can't reproduce continuous-tone color (which is what you see in a photograph, or colored artwork) directly. Various means have been devised to break continuous-tone images into patterns of dots that trick the eye into seeing shades of gray or color; the most common of these is called "halftoning." Most people will recognize halftones from reading newspapers (which tend to have coarse halftones with larger dots, because of the low-quality newsprint used; the better the paper, the finer--and harder to detect--a halftone becomes). Here is the original image:

And here is a magnified halftone of the area shown above in red:

If you squint really hard, or look at this image from across the room, it will start to look like a photograph instead of spatters of ink. Depending on the coarseness of the halftone, sometimes you just can't squint hard enough (or hold the image far enough away), and the dots will always be visible. A few famous 20th century artists (Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and others) celebrated halftones, since they are such an integral part of most of what we see in the modern world. But for designers, photographers, and printers, halftones are a necessary evil associated with reproducing images, an uneasy compromise that everyone has to learn to live with.

Moving on to color, most printing presses use four printing plates to represent a fairly broad range of colors visible to the human eye. These plates lay down the colors cyan (light blue), magenta (pinkish red), yellow, and black, generally in that order (though sometimes yellow is printed first). This method of reproducing color is additive: colors are applied on top of one another, and the combined effect results in something close to the intended pure color. Advanced printing methods sometimes use up to 8 or 12 colors to increase the color range of the image, supplementing the limited range of the four inks with specially-mixed colors.

In the case of The Golden Vine, we were quite happy with the range of colors our printer's press is capable of, but wanted to add a metallic gold ink for two of the visual styles in the book. For the following examples, this is the original image (note: computer screens can't display metallic color, so we have simulated the gold):

For printing, this image is broken down into five components, the standard cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, plus the gold ink:

Printed in sequence, adding one color after another (cyan, magenta, yellow, gold, black), the image looks like this:

To get the printing press to reproduce the subtle shades of each component color, they must be broken down into halftones. Using conventional halftoning methods, this is what the four printing plates for the top half image would look like at 30x magnification:

Printed in sequence:

As you can see, conventional halftoning really reduces the definition of the image, effectively blurring it, to make room for space between the dots. You will also notice that the dots on each color plate are aligned at different angles, resulting in little bull's-eye shapes (called "rosettes") that look almost like water ripples when the printing plates are combined. If the angle of any one of the color plates is off by even a bit, more unintended patterns develop. It takes delicate presswork, involving careful alignment to within tolerances of 1/1000th of an inch, to avoid this effect--and it's never exactly right.

Shoto Press chooses to use a more advanced imaging technique called stochastic (FM) screening. With this method, instead of producing regular patterns of different-sized dots that have to be carefully angled, lots of much smaller same-sized dots are placed randomly in the correct density. This technique is much better at fooling the eye into seeing continuous color.

Here is an example of stochastic screening used on the five printing plates for the bottom half of the image, at 30x magnification:

Printed in sequence:

You don't have to squint quite as hard when looking at something printed this way. Stochastic screening captures the details--fine lines and curves, and subtle color transitions--much better than conventional halftones. The distractingly regular patterns of conventional halftoning are also avoided, and the overall effect is soft and pleasantly diffused. Stochastic screening mimics the look of fine film grain, resulting in an image that looks more like continuous tones.

Here is a comparison of conventional and stochastic screening, alongside the original image:

If you had to choose between a conventional halftone and a stochastic image, which one would you rather look at?