What's causing my gradient problems in illustrator?

Question

I'm designing a window poster for shop, I'm working on this in illustrator and I'm trying to achieve this clean red to black gradient or feathered effect shown here,

A few things are confusing me, why does this banding effect or lined appearance show up on the image, also I can't seem to get the red and black to fade together very well like they have on the bargain booze picture, I think there's a few tricks to this I could do with knowing, they don't have the red to greyish gradient I have before the black part, although I do notice they have a little arrow covering that part of the transition between the black and red.

It's a CMYK project. Here's my image:

Answer 1

To fix this you need to match the CMYK channels in your black swatch with your red swatch.

In my example I'm using a red with CMYK values 0,100,100,0. Now for my black instead of using the values 0,0,0,100 change it to 0,100,100,100.

This black will print as a warm black. I would talk with your printer about their maximum ink coverage as this might be pushing it.

Answer 2

Try layering the black gradient over a red background (or vice versa) instead of trying to do a red-to-black gradient on a single layer:

On your top layer, create a gradient where black (or red) is at 100% opacity on one end of the color slider and white is at 0% opacity on the other end of the slider.

On the layer below color with solid red (or black).

This should allow you more control over the size of the gradient and help with the "banding effect or lined appearance" you're referring to.

Answer 3

if you want to have a smooth gradient u should do this. Make a color black rectangle and use it as the background. Make the same size rectangle and place it on top of the black you just made. Create a gradient for the top rectangle following the colors below.

1st color 100 magenta - 100 yellow: 100% opacity

2nd color 100 magenta - 100 yellow - 70 black: 100% opacity

3rd color black: 0% opacity

Then adjust the positions of the colors as you desire.

The pic below shows the result you should have.

Answer 4

You could set a black rectangle underneath, then bring in a 1 bit tiff halftone and color it black. The dots would / could be whatever size you choose and you might like to experiment with larger ones.

You could also auto-trace the dots, expand them and delete the white's after un-grouping in order to have a vector shape that you could colorize with your pallette.

I like the 1 bit halftones for their ability to colorize in illustrator from the AI pallette. This would allow you to use a 100 percent k background. I however prefer to use a "darker black" in my CMYK designs for large format printing that is made of 84,73,73,91. It comes out more black than flat dark grey on a Mimake.