most of what we design at electric angel is printed via a litho process, sometime on digital machines if it’s a short run. a few years back digital machines would never match litho colours, recently the quality has improved so it’s not too much of an issue.

but getting the right colour on litho is still a bit of an art. in short, most full colour printing is made up from 4 colours: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. and although this is commonly referred to as ‘full colour’ printing, the colours that can be created from these are limited. blues can tricky, good oranges near impossible.

most designers work to pantone process guides - an internationally recognised colour matching system. the theory is pick a colour, tell your printer the mix or reference and the end result is a perfect match. except that all printers calibrate their presses to their personal preference and they may not actually match the pantone process books. damn.

there is an a alternative - spot colours. but… in my experience a spot colour sometimes struggles to get the depth or flat appearance that full colour printing provides, especially on rougher surfaces.

but that’s technical stuff. what about how we actually perceive colour? let’s got back to orange. the nearest orange you can get with full colour litho is almost brown. but you can trick people - put it with the right blue and it looks more orange. and avoid putting it with a yellow or red unless you want it to look the colour of monkey poo.

so i’m always on the look out for a nugget of info about using colours and so i’ve just ordered ‘blue sky thoughts: colour consciousness and reality‘ by jamie carnis. the book suggests that colour isn’t just about wavelengths of light bouncing off surfaces, but actually a previously unrecognised entity in the universe. ok. can’t wait to use this one in a discussion at the printers…

went up to mima at the weekend to catch the bauhaus exhibition. middlesborough has had a bad press of late due to kirstie and phil, but before i get sidetracked on ms allsopp’s intriguing skirt lengths and mr spencer’s slightly tortured brand of sexual chemistry, i wanna talk about the mima factor.

i don’t think you can overstate mima’s contribution to middlesborough city centre - it’s a good gallery with a decent and surprisingly affordable cafe (gotta have a good cafe to make a gallery really work these days) but more than that it’s a fairly imposing piece of contemporary architecture with lots of space around. nice paddling pool/fountain too. never underestimate the importance of space in making a building look good. i wonder if they flattened lots of buildings to create it?

anyway, truth is middlesborough is far more pleasant than i was led to believe and that mima plays a massive role in creating that impression. middlesborough have got it so right with mima.

when i moved here there was talk of ‘tate scarborough’. this weekend’s visit reminded me of that idea: a big brave kind of cultural place - with brave creation of space - in scarborough would totally change some perceptions of our town. and make it a better place.

categories include ‘best business to business website’, ‘business to consumer’ plus some new ones for this year too. sadly the ‘best not-for-profit website’ award has been removed this year. it’s free to enter but get your skates on as the deadline is 4th february.

if i were to put that stuff on the electric angel blog it would get in the way of showing our work - which is the primary aim of our business web presence. i just hope i’ve got time to do both…

i admit i am an enthusiastic convert to blogs and blogging. and that’s because we’ve found our blog at electric angel to be hugely beneficial.

it’s sometimes the case that graphics designers have the most out of date websites - they have the skills to design and produce them but they often struggle to find time to do it. after literally years of having only a holding page because our last website was very out of date, we swapped to a blog.

it’s was a sudden decision - in fact we’d built quite a tasty new website but we realised that having a blog would enable us to update much quicker and collectively add a bit of personality to our web presence.

and it’s a been one of the best decisions we’ve made. we used to get about 8 visitors a month to our website (ok, so it only had our address and phone number on) but now we regularly get 400+ visitors a day - all that in under a year.

so the idea (thanks to ross) that creative coast ought to encourage local creatives to get blogging by setting up free blogs is an exciting one. i hope that other creatives find blogs as useful as we have and i look forward to when, is perhaps 12 months time, a google search for ’scarborough’ or ‘yorkshire coast’ will bring up a host of creatives blogging away and showing what a hotbed of creative talent we have in the area.