Project Highlight:
V’s Grinders

On June 1, Venietia Santana turned her dreams into reality when she opened her very own food truck in Juneau.

Parked in the Job Center parking lot at the end of a winding path through the grass, V’s Grinders serves up east-coast style subs and offers specialty tacos. But to get to this point, Venietia had a lot of planning and development to get through.

She came to Alaska Litho for help putting together some of the pieces. We worked with her to transform an initial logo sketch into a full-color, custom vector image that could be printed large enough for the side of a food truck. Our prepress team worked with her to finalize the logo and create a range of vinyl pieces to decorate the truck, printed at up to 8-feet wide!

Another important element to have in place for opening day was a website that included an online ordering system. Through personalized, hands-on training with Media Services we developed VsGrinders.com together with Venietia. She learned how to maintain it, integrate social media, and publish her own email newsletter with weekly specials.

If you have a project coming up that you'd like help with, send us a message!

PrePress Tip: To Impose or Not to Impose

When AK Litho prints your project, be it your business card or a corporate annual report, our prepress department will IMPOSE the final layout. Imposition is a process of file arrangement that seeks to print your project as efficiently as possible and/or arrange a series of pages so they can later be bound properly. Customers often impose their projects for us and nearly just as often we must un-impose the project so it can be imposed in a manner more suitable for the intended output device.

Imposition often means that your business card will be printed 2 at a time, maybe 8 at a time, or even 21 at a time.

The number of repetitions depends on a number of factors such as color, quantity, and even the stock being used. Your annual report may be printed 1 page at a time (1up), 2 pages at a time (2up) or even 4 pages at once (4up). Again, how the arrangement ends up depends on specific factors of the job.

Alaska Litho's prepress department has an array of imposition tools ready to organize your job's final PDF output into whatever imposition configuration is required by the equipment it is destined for. What does this mean for you? Scratch this detail off your list! We'll take care of it for you!

Microsoft Word and Publisher often try to impose a project for your desktop printer. If you are providing one of these file types, or a PDF from one of these file types, look through your print menus carefully and turn off any "multiple up" options. Similarly, with Adobe InDesign or Quark, make sure that you have not checked "spreads" or "reader spreads" or "booklet" when saving or exporting your files.

In the end, you'll have a bit less work to do and so will your prepress department!

Media Services Buzz:
Headed to Spain

This month Jenny Fremlin is headed to Barcelona, Spain, to present original research on media and community.

During an individual presentation at the 4th International Conference on Community Psychology she’ll be discussing ways to harness the power of media in local and international community building. Jenny was also invited to participate in a symposium highlighting some of the ways online communities influence members, support the emergence of subcultures, and enact social change.

The conference theme is Community & Politics In A World In Crisis. If you're interested in learning more about the conference, check out these videos by other presenters.

We're also still taking names for special presentations of Jenny's seminars. Send her a message to be added to the list!