This lesson was focused on packaging files to send, which will come in particularly useful when submitting our assignments. A lot of this involved checking that the images were the right quality, and the links worked etc.

Again, we were following instructions on paper, and the class became quite confusing when we realised there were pages missing and we were struggling to follow some of the steps. However we managed to package it correctly in the end and it will be useful to know this skill for a career in design. I imagine it will take a while to remember all the stages but practice will help.

After we did this, our next task was creating cover finish guides. This was something I always wondered how it was done so I was glad that we were getting the opportunity to learn this. Ness showed us the guides for the Jacqueline Wilson title Clover Moon. 

Foil guide:

Spot UV guide:

Embossing guide:

As it is a Jacqueline Wilson book, it will have enough budget to justify all the different finishes but with the Just So Stories redesign, the budget is quite low so I will have to keep this in mind for the assessment.

It will also be good to include a cover finish guide in my cover design assignment. We learned how to make a cover finish guide on Photoshop and then transfer to InDesign. The stages were very complicated though and I had to restart a few times.

I didn’t feel like I was fully understanding how it worked and how it was delivered to the printers. I asked Ness whether it was possible to make a finish guide for text on InDesign and she showed me that you merely duplicate the layer and fill the text in black which was much more simple. She also explained how it would work in industry. Generally you would leave it as a hidden layer, labelled correctly, and the printer will understand what it is for. I found it much more useful to have a context to the skills we have learned in the session and it made it much clearer.

Floris also have a useful guide to cover finishes:

http://www.florisbooks.co.uk/blog/2014/11/12/the-floris-guide-to-cover-finishes/