If accessories make the woman, then varnish makes the printed piece. It's remarkable what new varnishing techniques are available today. They're so impressive that I have invited Daniel Dejan (yes, that Daniel) of Sappi Fine Paper to speak on this topic at our November conference in Westford, MA.

Daniel Dejan is the North American ETC Print & Creative Manager for Sappi Fine Paper. He is unique. Daniel's not only an authority in paper, design, and color management, but he is also a fantastic, engaging public speaker. It's rare you get all of this talent in one person.

On November 5th at our conference, Daniel takes the stage from 11 to 12 to cover Dazzling Varnish Techniques: Bridging Between the Technical and the Creative. An upcoming Print Tip will provide an interview with Daniel about this session and what you'll take away from it.

For the benefit of those new to printing, print buying, and graphic design, I now share with you some basics about varnish.

Types of Varnishes

Varnish acts much like an ink. It's applied either during the printing process (in-line varnishing) or after a job's printed (off-line varnishing). The four types of varnishes are gloss, dull, satin, and tinted.

Varnish starts out as a translucent, neutral medium. You add a glossing agent to make it reflective (for gloss varnish), or a dulling agent to make it refractive and diffusive (for dull varnish). Matte varnish is simply achieved by adding additional amounts of a dulling agent.

Satin varnish is particularly beautiful. It is achieved by adding a mix of both the dulling and the glossing agents, giving it a sheen and, more importantly, enhancing the textures in an image.

Tinted varnish is the result of reintroducing a pigment back into the varnish, which gives it a bit of color. Tinted varnishes can be spot or halftone varnishes (keep reading). Dejan explained that before the advent of Adobe Photoshop®, tinted varnishes were really popular with designers. Once Photoshop was introduced, designers could ghost back images, create step-and-repeats, etc., so tinted varnish lost popularity.

When properly done, tinted varnishes are quite subtle and elegant. They can overprint text, even halftone images, thereby creating a beautiful, subliminal effect.

Why Would You Use Varnish?

There are three reasons to use varnish.

1. Use varnish for scratch and scuff resistance.

   Because dried inks show fingerprints and other blemishes, varnishes (and other coatings) are used to protect the finished pieces.

   For pure protection, printers generally use an overall varnish on the entire printed page. You can also apply varnish to a particular section or image. When this happens, it's known as a spot varnish.

   Overall varnish can be done with gloss, dull, or satin. When a designer specifies an overall dull varnish, it's usually being used to reduce glare and increase readability, because dull varnish has a significant impact on readability.

2. Use varnish for visual attention.

   It helps to prioritize design elements for the viewer. Spot varnish means the printer adds varnish "edge to edge"; that is, the coating covers a photo, a certain section of type, or another design element. Its effect is very subtle. The human eye is more attracted to the shiny elements on a printed sheet. So if you spot varnish something using a gloss, it acts like punctuation, noted Dejan, leading you to "look here…and look here…and look here!" Gloss varnish punctuates the elements a designer wants to emphasize.

   Dull varnish will do the opposite: it will DE-emphasize whatever's varnished. Dejan called it "sending it back in the hierarchy of importance."

3. Use varnish to create dimension.

   How? With halftone or dot-on-dot varnishing. That's when a printer takes a portion of a halftone, maybe the highlights, maybe the shadows, and puts dots of varnish directly on dots of ink.

   This technique's amazing. If you add dull dot-on-dot varnish to the black plate in your halftone, the black shadows will recede, visually, and your piece will begin to take on three dimensionality.

That, my friends, is a short primer on varnish. I am grateful to Daniel Dejan for his help with today's Tip. Daniel can be reached via email at Daniel.Dejan@sappi.com. Sappi's web site is www.sappi.com. Coming up soon: a Q&A with Daniel on new varnish techniques.