The following is a funny explanation of a mistake made by our printing press partners, The Leder. John C. Schroeder ’74, the Sun’s production manager and all around press guru narrates for your enjoyment. Having a print edition of December 6th’s paper in hand might help with the explanations:
“If any of you thought the color looked a little odd on the front and back pages of today’s paper, you were correct.
Granted, because of the last-night-of-the-semester partying, the last flats got to The Leader VERY late: the last flat was sent just before 4:45 a.m. So The Leader’s press crew was rushed.
However, that does not excuse a major error on their part: The Leader’s press crew put the magenta plate for the front and back pages on the press unit containing yello ink, and put the yellow plate for the front and back pages on the press unit containing magenta ink.
So everything that was supposed to print yellow printed magenta instead, and everything that was supposed to print magenta printed yellow instead.
So, for example, the sun above the cloud under the “Weather” heading at the bottom of the front page appears “hot pink” in the printed Sun, when it was supposed to be bright yellow. And the rainbow line
under the front-page mast in the printed edition has the odd color distribution
ORANGE – PINK -VIOLET – PURPLE – BLUE – DARK GREEN -LIGHT GREEN
instead of the distribution that we actually sent to The Leader,which corresponded to the order of the rainbow:
RED – ORANGE – YELLOW -GREEN – BLUE – PURPLE – VIOLET.
The oddest effect was on the back page, where (in the bottom photo)the yellow band along the bottom of the Lynah Rink wall, and the yellow part of the signs on this wall, appear in the printed edition of The Sun in “hot pink.”
In fact, the whole back page of the printed Sun has pink all over the place, because all of the info boxes that were supposed to appear with a cream-yellow background instead printed with a background of pink.
Similarly, on the front page, the portions of signs in the China photo that were supposed to print as shades of yellow instead printed as pink.
I called Cathy Dencenburg at The Leader to inform her of this, and she said she would be willing to eliminate the color charge for the Friday issue of The Sun from our bill because of The Leader’s mistake.
— J.S.
P.S.: If you want to check out all the color inversions, compare the front and back pages of the printed version of Friday’s Sun to the PDFs of the front and back pages on cornellsun.com.
The color inside the paper (on Pages 10 & 15) printed correctly, since these pages went through separate press units where the plates were placed correctly.”