23 - Illustration and Production (Printing Plates)

In the last post, I talked about bleed and margin. This time, it’s about printing plates and why they can be very important.

For larger productions, offset printing is the standard. In this process, printing plates are created for the colors cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK), which are then used for printing. For smaller print runs (500–1500), these plates also count as tooling costs.

Why am I mentioning this? Some companies offer special colors and use a fifth printing plate for them (something you should clarify when requesting quotes). This fifth plate can be used for special colors such as metallic inks. But it can also be an additional black plate. This has the following advantage:

If you want to produce a game in multiple languages, the text can be removed from the main black plate and placed on the fifth additional plate. This can potentially save tooling costs, because for an additional language you only need one extra plate instead of four.

Source: Panda Game Manufacturing - Design Guidebook

This is why it’s important, when creating illustrations, to ensure that text can be edited separately from the artwork. In general, the design should be set up so that the text can use the same color everywhere. If, for example, you decide to use white text on dark backgrounds and black text on light backgrounds, you’ll run into problems.

Do you have more experience with printing and maybe something to add? There’s definitely still a lot to learn. Questions are helpful too. I’m looking forward to your comments.