How Click Is Made

It's time to make a new issue of CLICK. It will be about animal families.

What stories and pictures should be in it? The editors and art director get together to discuss their ideas.

The editor asks one writer who knows about puffins and another one who knows about elephant families to write stories for CLICK.

When the writers send in their stories, the editors read them carefully to make sure there are no mistakes.

The art director decides where the words, art, and photos will go on each page. She uses the computer to design what the magazine pages will look like.

She finds an artist who is good at drawing elephants and asks him to draw baby elephants with their moms.

Everyone helps pick the photos that go best with the stories.

When the sketches come in everyone checks to be sure they match the story.

The finished art is sent to the prepress company. The art is wrapped around a roller in a special machine, which scans the art so it can be used on a computer. Another machine makes a print of the scanned art. The art director checks the print to make sure that the colors match the original artwork.

The editors check the CLICK stories many times to be sure there are no mistakes.

Then a computer disk of the whole magazine is sent to the printing company.

The press is very big and very noisy. A giant roll of paper is attached to one end. Big rollers pull the paper over and under, under and over, through the press.

The printer sends back color proofs that show exactly what the pages will look like when they are printed. The editors and art director check the pages one last time to be sure that everything is correct. Then they give the OK, and the press starts to print CLICK.

Around some of the rollers are thin sheets of metal, called plates, that look like the pages in CLICK. These plates have tiny dots on them to pick up ink from the ink rollers and put the ink onto the paper. There's a different plate for each color of ink.

CLICK is printed with only four colors-yellow, red, blue, and black. If you look at a page, of CLICK through a strong magnifying glass, you can see dots of the four colors of ink used in printing.

Addresses are put on the covers, and then all the copies of CLICK are sent to the post office so they can be mailed to your house or to your school, library or bookstore.

Copyright Carus Publishing Company Feb 2005
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved