After several years of discussing the topic of ‘Certified Color’ (or ISO12647) RIT’s School of Print Media decided to start developing an audit and certify program for printers in North America. “RIT is an autonomous organization with the reputation and the know-how to fill this much-needed demand”. A bit late, but welcome to the party guys! More details in this PDF. (Tip of the hat to mr. Gianotten.)

The InDesign User Group Amsterdam has another great gig coming up for everyone that’s interested in typography. A totally free all-day event with type designers and InDesign experts. Details in Dutch after the ‘read more’. Read more

A great deal of corporate identities can be found at the website of Hans Stol (just click the names on the right). A lot of the identities of the companies, schools —or even entire cities— are Dutch. As such you might not always be able to read the text, but you do get a great inside look of Dutch Design like the city of Amsterdam. Dutch readers might want to download Hans his PDF-presentation at the bottom of this page. It’s a great catalogue and you can learn a lot just browsing through all the different identities or study how to best set up an advanced online corporate identity.

Ever needed to send really big files to a client that can’t use FTP? Then you know it’s not easy. Services like YouSendIt or Send2Deliver are free but usually have a limit of just 100 Mb and they’ll send out advertisement-emails to you and your client. Now there’s a new Dutch Service that’s absolutely free and supports up to 2 Gigabyte. It’s WeTransfer. The service is free, requires no registration, holds up to 2 Gigabyte and keeps the data for two weeks. Perfect! How can they do it? They sell advertising-space for the entire background. And some of those those backgrounds look really nice. (Just a thought but they would make nice wallpapers as well guys!)

Recently the 45th printer company in the Netherlands got ISO 12647 approval. This basically means their entire operation is dedicated to the so-called ‘Certified Color’ process. The ISO qualification guarantees their printing quality, the inks, paper and just about every detail you can think of. As such companies selecting these printers can rest assure they will receive the best possible quality. More and more companies that rely on perfect color (such as the food-business) are starting to find out. The 45th printer to join the ISO qualification is Telenga located in the Frisian town Franeker. Currently only 45 printers carry the complete ISO 12647. Another 135 have stated they can reproduce the exact quality. (One of the important things about the ISO process is the fact that a client is able to measure the quality. The ISO guidelines, rules and datasets are available to anyone. As such complete ISO approval is not absolutely necessary in order to reach the same level of quality). Of course these companies are not able to carry the official ISO approval. Read more

From Frederik Ruys: We’re proud to present the lineup of our third Dutch Infographic Conference IC10, on march 5th 2010 in the design Hotel Theater Figi in Zeist. Among the speakers are: Charles Blow (graphic director New York Times, National Geographic Magazine), Prof. Michael Stoll (professor for Informationdesign and Media Theory), Liesbeth Melkert (head visual department at the daily Het Parool), Lars Scholten (professor at the multimedia college in amsterdam), Mark Bryson (BBC Interactive Designer), CatalogTree (Processing and Datavisualisation) and Chris Campbell (Infographic Designer at the International Crime Court in The Hague). Infographic legend John Grimwade kicks off the award ceremony of the Dutch Infographic Award 2009. The conference is concluded with a drink in Figi’s Atrium, sponsored by the Association of Dutch Designers. Read more

The Amsterdam InDesign User Group has a great gig coming up: Henk Gianotten wil be discussing how to achieve predictable and high quality colors for your printed artwork. He’ll also discuss how to set up the colors of a new corporate identity. If you think you already know how to do this by just selecting a few Pantone colors, well… you obviously haven’t met Henk! His 2nd session discusses the use of PDF and how search-engines like Google index them. Henk will show you what you can do to create better PDF files using meta-data. This InDesign User Group Afternoon is scheduled for the 12th of January at the Adobe HQ in Amsterdam. Read more

Met dank aan BNO, CMBO en het KVGO kan ik met jullie de nieuwste (geheel herziende) Richtlijn Aanleveren delen. In hun eigen woorden: “De nieuwe richtlijn moet de communicatie tussen ontwerpers en drukkers verbeteren. Tegelijk verschijnt er een tweede variant die zich richt op het proces tussen ontwerpers en opdrachtgevers. In de communicatie tussen ontwerpers en drukkers kan veel fout gaan maar ook tussen ontwerpers en hun opdrachtgevers ontstaat vaak ruis op de lijn. Het gevolg is dat vaak het product, het traject, de opbrengst of de prijs bij een van deze partijen niet aan de verwachtingen voldoet. Read more

The First Dutch InDesign User Magazine was released yesterday. It’s a free download but registration at the InDesign User forum is required before you can download it. And because it’s a PDF Magazine you can use the links in each article to discuss or post questions at the InDesign User website. I also had the honor to contribute to the magazine and wrote an article about what to do after you’ve finished your design. I wrote about the checks you can perform to make sure your document will print fine and how to find and eliminate those small errors that always somehow sneek in complex designs. (It’s a rather lengthy article bit perhaps I’ll translate it if I get around to it). I hope the Dutch readers will find it usefull.

You might have noticed the Markzware banner. I use Markzware Flightcheck to preflight and especially to collect my Adobe Illustrator artwork. Markzware now has a Black Friday to Cyber Monday 30% off deal for FlightCheck, Q2ID, ID2Q, PUB2ID and MarkzTools. Make sure you use the Coupon Code: CYBER30 to receive your 30% off deal when ordering.