Your design goes off to the printer and comes back a week later as 10,000 high-quality, full-color brochures. Yes, your graphic design talents were needed, but so was the art of the PrePress Production Operator:
Multiple Intelligence lesson plan, #4
Color bar, Crop marks, Resgister marks, Tick or Fold marks, Legend- all some of the elements that help tie your design together into what will be a predictable output via PDF. And oh yes, they preflight, as should you! As designers, several of the “tips” that are given often regard having a better understanding of the prepress process and a good communication with the printer. See link below to article:
Zevrix has today announced that they have updated their professional quality control tool for graphical source files. This is a neat, affordable software for checking image files which is further noted in the press release as;
“…Graphic Inspector provides a professional quality control solution for users of any trade, whether it’s print, prepress, web design, electronic publishing or digital photography. With Graphic Inspector, users automatically get crucial information on multiple raster and vector files, saving hours of manual checking and eliminating costly mistakes. Graphic Inspector will display the file kind, color mode, resolution, compression, color profile, spot colors, fonts, metadata and other attributes.”
SOURCE: http://graphicstart.com/viewarticle.php?articleid=126
Never before has the world of graphic arts been so dynamic, so ripe with change and new opportunities afforded by emerging creative technologies. And no longer are the creations made in popular desktop programs - like QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Word - bound to the traditional constraints of print. These days, businesses create content for any number of purposes.
As a graphic designer, has this ever happened to you?
The scenario: You’ve sent your marketing masterpiece that you have meticulously designed to your printer. The deadline is tight, but you made it. Then the phone rings. Its your printer calling to let you know they are having problems printing your piece. You are about ready to scream because the client is waiting to get this piece out to his customers.
Preflight, in the graphic arts sense, is the process of checking a digital document before it goes to plate, print or otherwise output (exported - such as to PDF). It traditionally is a way to check quality before going to the printing press, digital or otherwise, but can also be used to check online banners and gifs. Preflight is best done on the source document, such as those created in Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, QuarkXPress or Corel!Draw as some examples, before becoming a PDF (Portable Document Format). Similar to a pilot whom walks around and performs a pre take-off pre-flight check, preflighting for designers and prepress operators should be a must.
If like many designers you are in the process of making the big switch from QuarkXPress to InDesign, you know it is not a trivial undertaking. You have to retrain your brain to a new way of working and remind your fingers which keys to hit for those newfangled shortcuts. You are in a hurry to get up to speed, and you have just been asked to create a client’s next newsletter in InDesign. The template for the newsletter is currently in QuarkXPress. You’ve finally come to that fork in the road: Do you build a new newsletter template from scratch, or do you take the easy way out and just open the file with InDesign? If there’s a lot of work in the template, go for File > Open. While it’s surprising this works at all, you should know what converts and what does not.
London, UK – XChange International, the source for extended technology worldwide, are pleased to announce two FREE one-day seminars, presenting time saving solutions for businesses — small and large — to save money and become more productive. The seminars, co-sponsored by Quark, Markzware, Enfocus and other extended technology software publishers, will be held in Central London on the 29th and 30th April 2008.
If you have been in the print industry for any length of time, you know that there are certain file types printers dread receiving from customers. Right at the top of the list is content created in Microsoft Publisher. You see, almost every prepress department out there is Mac-based, and Microsoft has never released a Mac version of Microsoft Publisher.
Attention:Printers, graphic designers, prepress professionals and publishers Markzware is coming to a city near you!
First stop is beautiful San Diego, California at the San Diego Convention Center. On February 20, visit Markzware at booth # 404, during the “Passion For Print” show, hosted by the PIASD.
Second stop join us in warm and sunny Miami at that Graphic of the Americas at the Miami Convention Center booth #1503 February 28-March 1.
Third stop will be the historical city of Boston for the On Demand show at the Boston Convention Center booth # 120 March 4-6.
