This week in our InDesign class, we learned about trapping. I had no idea what to expect when it came to this assignment. I learned that trapping in printing is the compensation for misregistration between printing units on a multicolor press or even between a color and a particular finish, such as hot foil. We did ten different assignments to demonstrate the many different ways and types of trapping. For the first one, we started with two A’s. One was rich black and the other just black. While there wouldn’t appear to be a difference to the naked eye, throw a CMYK box behind the A’s, and you can see there is. One A was slightly more opaque than the other. This proves essential regarding printing and whether you want a true black. The last one we did was make an example of Spread v Choke. We drew four yellow boxes, and in one box, we knocked out the phrase “print production” from the box, leaving the text to appear white. In the next box, we gave the phrase a white fill. Again, to the naked eye, you wouldn’t notice this; however, if you wanted your text to be in front of something and still appear, knocking it out would be the way to go versus simply wanting white text. This process was frustrating because everyone kept having technical problems; however, minus those problems, the assignment itself was actually pretty easy.
