Wrap it up - Continued

After deciding on the rough design for one of the nets I have chosen to try and make the imagery and type work across the other two nets as well.

I started off by simply tying to move the same design over on to the next net.
As you can see below, it didn't really work out and the result was very boring.
You can see that the colours are also slightly weird which I will get to.

I also noted that this next would need both sides printed or the entire outside/inside would be really boring.

This was the next design that I worked with to try and make the net more interesting. I liked the patterned effect but it didn't really relate well to the other net.

It was at this point that I had a lot of issues with lining up the double sided print as you ca see in the image below, but I managed to fix them later on in the production.

At this point I decided to change the direction of this design and follow a bit more in the style of the unused idea of the first net. I first printed out a rough version of the net and then drew on the image of the manta ray by hand.

I unfolded it to see where the parts of the manta ray drawing would be. It isn't as impressive as on the previous net but it's still a nice way to use the strange net shape to my advantage.

I scanned in the image and used illustrator to create a vectorised version of my hand drawing. I knew that it would roughly line up if I did it this way.

After changing the colours to fit my original design, I printed the document and cut it out.

It was at this point that I noticed that the colours had changed drastically from the first design.

I checked all the swatches and levels of CMYK and made sure that they were equal between the prints and then printed again creating the same result as above. Unfortunately this colour difference was a result of using two different printers.
The first design was printed on a home standard inkjet HP Deskjet F2480 which gave the colours that I actually wanted whereas the digital print room laser printers gave two really different colours in comparison.

I wanted to have a rough idea of the colours of the prints for proofing and mocking up so I tried to get some colours that I liked the look of together. It is hard to show how different the screen image can be from the printed image, but thanks to varying contrast and brightness on the screen it was very different.
Already there were two aspects stopping me from choosing the right colours; Different printers and different screens.

This is a prime example of how Pantone Matching System is a brilliant idea.

Anyway, as a temporary solution I printed the designs below to see if they had any good colours on them,but the colours were too dark and very vibrant.

To try and solve this, I printed off these 8 squares of different light and dark blue colours.

I then matched up the original inkjet print to these laser colours to see which colours were closest so that I could use them in my designs. The two colours that I picked were the first colour from the second row and the second colour from the third row which you can see from this photo are relatively close to the inkjet colours. 

I took the exact same colours from the illustrator document and used them in my design for the net. 

I saved the document as a PDF and chose to double sided print it because this is the only way I know how.

Look at the colours I got from that print.

I was really annoyed at not understanding why this was happening, but decided to get on with designing. 

I kept the front design and decided to use a similar style of type as the first net as well. I changed the words slightly to say "THESE ARE IMPORTANT" and repeated it across the net.

At this point I also changed the colours around a bit and printed out this front view which gave me some colours that I thought were ok for now. The screen colours were better but I decided that that could probably be sorted out when going to digital print.

I decided to leave that net as it was and start working on the final box net. I still wanted to incorporate the same aspects as the other nets to create a link between the three. So I came up with this design:

I used the same image of the manta ray and the same type to link them together but this time I took the pattern of the manta ray and layered it underneath the larger symbol with a halftone of the same colour. These are the same colours as the example above it so you can kind of see how different the screen image is to the printed one. 

I really liked the manta ray pattern with this so I used it as the back of the original hexagon net to link it together even more. 

So everything is fine and I decide to quickly test print the nets on the laser printers, bearing in mind that I knew what colours would be coming out this time.

Then I get this. 

And the colours are wrong again! 

It's at this point that I finally understand when it was happening and with a bit of help from Mike I was able to print properly.

I realised that it was happening whenever I did a double sided print, and the only difference between the double sided and the single sided prints was that I was exporting as a PDF before printing.

It turns out that exporting as a PDF will assign the document a different colour profile compared to the one that Illustrator gives it so a print from each will look incredibly different. 

Mike then taught me how to print double sided from Illustrator which turns out to be really similar to any other double sided print.