3-color gradient won't print correctly

[Dinah]

I prepared a business card (which includes the company logo) for print in Illustrator 8.0 on a PC. Within the logo is a "globe" that consists of 3 (100%) spot colors in a radial gradient. The "middle" color is exactly halfway throughout the blend.

When sent to a professional printer, I was told that the gradient looked great in their proofs, but then when the image went to the negative and printing and negative stage, the gradient did not look right, and that perhaps there weren't enough steps?

Am curious what steps to take to remedy this problem, as I have never encountered this issue before.

Thanks!

 

[GeorgeMack]

On something the size of business cards, I doubt that you'd run out of steps, as you would blending the length of a large page.

There may possibly be a factor in the spot-color aspect of the blend, but I don't really see why; that could be due to some "secret sauce" Adobe put into the mix.

Try searching Adobe's tech library for blends.
I think I recall a thread there where Illustrator was applying the wrong number of steps in output (It would think it was rendering for the screen at 72 dpi). If I'm not mistaken, there may have been a download to fix this, or a workaround, but I've never had this particular problem and jumped the 8.0 version, so I'm not sure.

 

[askIllustrator]

film proofs tend to hold smaller dots much better than printed pieces. A proof is imaged and the remainder peeled off where a press is actually more of a stamping meathod or pushing ink through small holes. Its likely that there was too small of a line screen on the printed piece, a larger line screen will give the smaller dots a better chance of showing up. When you think about how ink spreads when it hits the stock, its not suprising that some your highly detailed areas would close up.