I’ve never designed a Risograph print, but I picked this book up because I’m a nerd for all printmaking, I wanted to learn more about the process, and the book looked beautiful. A lot of learning through the printmaking community happens through workshops and small publications. I’ve made guides for screen printing and taught workshops myself, so I appreciate anyone who takes the time to test processes and compile information for others to use.
Although I haven’t technically designed anything for the process, it works much like gravure printing, or perhaps a hybrid between gravure and screen. The close similarity that it shares with gravure is that the designer can work in tonal variations or anti-aliased pixels. The duplication process converts smooth tone to halftone at 60 LPI and each color is printed as a separate spot color.
The limitations to the process are generally: print size constraint, registration, and limitation to factory spot colors. However, limitations can guide the creative process and lead to innovations and learning. Probably the single greatest appeal of the process, to me, other than the fun of it, is that it is much more environmentally friendly than screen printing or even other digital processes because the inks are made from soy. It’s also nice that if working in a smaller format, the process can render smaller details than screen printing without the same difficulties.
I did have one critique of the separation process that the authors describe. Although their process is easy for an inexperienced designer to understand, it is misleading. The authors follow a separation process that seems to be common in Asia; every gravure printer that I’ve worked with has used it. That process is to simply convert a CMYK image into multi-channel mode and manipulate the spot colors and tonal balance of each channel.
This can be useful in some instances but it’s more of a conversion than a separation. I think it can be a gateway to lead a curious but inexperienced designer to learn more about separations, but it doesn’t allow for clean color separations, which one might especially want for illustrations. The authors’ process looks good in the book because they almost exclusively show halftone images that have been separated into the fun Riso colors.
With that criticism in mind, I highly recommend the book to anyone who wants to learn more about Risograph or spot color printing.
You may also want to check out my separation guide here.
No Magic in Riso is published by O.OO Design & RIsograph Room, based in Taipei, Taiwan.