Precision Disc Blog

At Precision Disc we have two standard print solutions for our replicated CD and DVD discs – up to six spot-colour silkscreen printing as well as CMYK offset printing.

While silkscreen printing is definitely ‘old school’ technology, when compared to CMYK offset printing spot-colour silkscreen printing can still provide superior print results for some designs. We won’t get too involved in the graphic design aspect within this article but we do have other resource material available on the topic of graphic design.
 

 
The benefits of silkscreen printing on CD or DVD

Silkscreen printing spot-colours for CD and DVD utilizes pigmented inks with a gloss finish. This is different than CMYK offset printing which utilizes translucent inks and has more of a matte finish.

Due to the consistency of the pigmented spot-colour inks they provide better and more consistent coverage for large areas of solid colour and, additionally, the gloss finish is very appealing to the eye.

Basic design rules for silkscreen printing on CD or DVD

As noted above, when compared to CMYK offset printing, silkscreen printing can provide superior print results for some designs… some, but not all. The best results generally come from artwork that is designed as follows:

• Maximum of six colours (including white flood)
• Using line art – not bitmaps.
• Utilizing large areas of solid colour.
• Graphics that are bold and don’t feature a lot of fine detail.
• Text that is relatively bold – not small or featuring fine detail.
• Avoiding drop-shadows and other effects that feature less than 100% solid colour.
• Don’t use Photoshop as it outputs graphics and text as bitmaps – not line art.

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Choose Precision Disc Manufacturing Corp. as your factory-direct partner for CD DVD manufacturing and CD DVD duplication along with eco-friendly print and packaging solutions. Our offices and manufacturing facility are located in Surrey, BC (a suburb of Vancouver) and we ship to clients throughout Canada and the U.S. daily.
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This is number three is a series of graphic design tutorials for Silkscreen printing CD and DVD discs. This tutorial relates to designing your CD or DVD print without a white flood (aka: white backprint).

Other graphic design tutorials that we recommend for your review include creating colour separations and using less than 100% solid colour for your Silkscreen Print design, as well learning the issues relating to colour correctness.

It’s possible to use the shiny aluminum/silver disc surface colour in your design. Doing so can be very effective but it’s important to understand how much room you actually have to work with.

Regardless of whether you are creating a design with ‘positive’ print (solid lettering and/or graphics printing on the silver background) or a ‘negative’ print (printing a solid colour that utilizes the disc’s surface as the colour for your lettering and/or graphics) be aware that there are actually three different parts of the disc that can be printed onto:

1. The largest area is the aluminum/silver coloured area that holds the disc data/content.
2. Closer to the middle there is the “mirror band” which is a very shiny/reflect silver colour. 
3. Surrounding the center hole there is an area which will either be clear plastic (as is generally the case with a CD disc) or additional shiny/reflective silver (which is generally the case with a DVD disc).

Avoiding The “Danger Area” In Your Disc Design – As noted above, there are actually three different parts of the CD or DVD that can be printed onto. If you’d like to utilize the aluminum/silver colour of the disc’s surface in your design but avoid the hazards of any unsightly overlaps onto the mirror band and/or center section of the disc, the ‘danger area’ is within a 36mm diameter (18mm radius) of the center of the disc.

Read this entire graphic design tutorial complete with illustrations. 

Our first Tutorial for Silkscreen Printed discs was how to create colour separations, and based on the positive feedback we’ve received we have followed that up with  Tutorial Number Two: Using Less Than 100% Solid Colour.

From our experience a lot of todays do-it-yourself designers (as well as a fair few professional graphic designers) aren’t experienced in designing for commercial print and don’t realize that designing for the internet or multimedia applications has a different set of rules than that of commercial print. For those designers Silkscreen printing must seem like a plot to drive them crazy.

One of the best features about many methods of modern printing is designing on a computer-screen where “what you see is what you get” (aka: WYSIWYG) … you get to proof your designs on the very same display device that the finished design will be viewed on (though we will conveniently ignore the fact that the colours may look different when viewed on different computer monitors).

With commercial print, what you see on your monitor may very well NOT be what you get… with Silkscreen printing being the biggest offender. Proof-in-point is when you use less than 100% solid colours in your design but, rather than re-explain it all here in this post, it’s better to read out our tutorial which shows images of the difference between what you see on your monitor and what will actually go to print.