My ad director effervesced into my production office one day, positively bubbling over with joy. “I just sold a two-page, four-color ad,” he gushed. He had a right to feel burbly. Our magazine was a small regional monthly, perpetually struggling to keep its head above water. A two-page ad was literally a lifeline to success.
So why did I feel like I might be going down for the third time? “Where did you promise to place the ad?” I asked. “Well, of course, on the inside cover and page one,” he said. Glug.
The problem was that our magazine was printed on two different sheets. The cover was a nice-looking, 80-pound, #3 sheet; the body text was a cheap, 50-pound #5. It was bad enough that these papers were different weights and had different amounts of coating, meaning that they experienced different amounts of dot gain. I could compensate for that on press by adjusting the fountain keys to get a fairly good match across the gutter.
No, the real iceberg in my sea of misery was the fact that our two papers were actually two different colors of white. The cover was blue-white, the body a kind of drab grayish. There was no way a two-page ad printed on such different whites was going to look good.
White Isn’t White
Process inks are transparent, which means that they let wavelengths of light pass through them, hit the paper, and reflect back to our eyes. The inks aren’t totally transparent, however. They absorb roughly one-third of the visible spectrum of light, allowing the other two-thirds of the spectrum to pass through. Cyan ink, for example, absorbs red light but lets green and blue go through. When the light reflects back to our eyes, bouncing back from the paper and passing through the ink film, we see cyan.
Unfortunately, no process ink absorbs its one-third share of the spectrum perfectly. (Yellow ink does the best; magenta, the worst.) So process inks never reproduce the full color spectrum accurately.
Paper can really help process inks do a better job of color saturation and fidelity by reflecting all the available light back. In the real world, mirrors do that, but paper does not. Even the best papers absorb some light, depriving our eyes of a portion of the spectrum. Worse yet, the paper fibers tend to absorb more of some wavelengths of light than others. This means that paper itself — even white paper — has a color.
What keeps white paper from being pure white is a chemical in the pulp called lignin. Lignin is a substance that forms the cell walls of the original plant. It’s a kind of brownish color, like grocery bags.
Paper mills can bleach out the lignin, making paper look whiter. Mills can also apply clay-based coating to further whiten the paper surface. But these processes are expensive. So mills offer paper buyers different grades of paper. The grade of a paper is determined by how much light the paper reflects — in other words, how bright/white it is. Number-one sheets reflect the most light and are the brightest and whitest. Number-five sheets reflect the least light and are the dullest and grayest.
A Paler Shade of White
How white does your paper have to be? If bright, saturated colors are important in your design, you should select the brightest, whitest paper you can afford because this white reflects the most ambient light. If color fidelity matters, you also need the whitest paper because it skews color wavelengths the least.
But bright/white paper is not always the best choice. If your design calls for a lot of text, you might want to choose a duller paper. That’s because brightness is fatiguing to the eye. All that light bouncing around tires us out. It’s no accident that War and Peace is always printed on creamy-white, uncoated paper. The publishers don’t want to give readers snow blindness.
In short, the amount of whiteness and brightness you need depends on the job your paper has to perform. Like everything else to do with paper, you have to balance factors that sometimes conflict: readability vs. color saturation; cost vs. affordability; common sense vs. folly.
In the case of our magazine’s two-page ad, we should have bitten the bullet and bought enough higher-grade, bright/white paper to give us a four-page cover and a good two-page spread. Instead, we kept our cheap body stock, got a terrible two-page spread, and lost any chance for a twelve-time contract with our advertiser. Eventually our magazine, drowning in a sea of red ink, went belly up. End of story.
Copyright © 2002-2003 PaperSpecs Inc.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on October 3, 2003
Commenting is easier and faster when you're logged in!
