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:
Even though the technologies enabling businesses to create documents have become more accessible, there remains a hidden cost in the generation of print and electronic media—a cost easily offset with some simple tools and best practices
Perhaps you’ve seen the commercials by print giants like Xerox and Hewlett-Packard, in which they espouse how cheap print has become? Indeed, the cost to generate color print these days is, in fact, much less expensive for businesses than it was just a few short years ago.
There is a great thread running over on PrintPlanet.com titled, “Flight Check Pro vs. Pit Stop?” where the initial poster asks, “which one is best? And why?” The responses were interesting and for the most part accurate, such as;
“Can you preflight Quark, illustrator, eps, indesign or photoshop files in Pitstop?
That’s why my vote go to Flightcheck.”
Posted, ‘Ryan’ (implying that FlightCheck can preflight numerous file formats)
‘HappyFriday’ posted; “We run Flight Check Prof on our native files and PDFs. When I have time, I often preflight PDFs in both Flight Check and Acrobat.
Your in-plant is slick. You’ve got the latest and greatest in print engines and a stealthy prepress workflow. But, what good is it when the front end of the process is replete with bad files — customer - supplied content that’s poorly prepared and requires time and expense to fix?
This is a problem many printing organizations — and in-plants, instant print shops, large-format print suppliers and general commercial printing companies — face today. Content coming into many printing plants just isn’t good.
Henno Jacques, a freelance designer in Holland, gets interviewed by Markzware Europe’s Arnold Roosch in this perfect example on why to use FlightCheck Professional (and ID2Q in his case):
FlightCheck Professional and ID2Q user review
Dutch version of this interview can be found here…
It is excellent how he is using FlightCheck to preflight everything BEFORE making the PDF. He also checks the resulting PDF/X file with FlightCheck Professional as well. Making brochures, booklets and the likes, he also has seen from experience that sending both the press-ready PDF as well as the open source file (where he uses FlightCheck to collect all fonts and images into one approved folder) is the best way to get the print-job to the printer. This way, if there are any last minute changes, corrections or press problems, they can quickly and safely make the changes and re-output the PDF job.
Acrobats Preflight tools are powerful and complex. But you can simplify your preflight life by creating a standalone droplet. Then, any PDF you drop onto it will be tested against specific project requirements, and can then be automatically moved into a different folder and a report generated.
One nice thing about flying in small countries is that you often get a close-up view on many of the procedures. Heading back from Caye Caulker to Belizé City on a 10-minute Tropic Air flight was a real treat both in terms of seeing the preflight and flight routines and in not having to take the cramped, long-lasting ferry boat back. See picture gallery of this flight here.
Naturally, this just re-enforces the need for quality control checks throughout the workflow- both in aviation as well as print-media. Preflight, Postflight and all sorts of other flights are certainly a must for top-notch PDF’s or print-jobs. Design to land safely- create to print properly!
With the advent of digital workflow, new responsibilities emerge for the newspaper publisher and the ad creator
Ask most newspaper sales executives, and they’ll tell you just how competitive the market place is these days — how tough of a sell it is when other media forms are drawing the interest of advertisers like never before.
Newspapers must be able to compete with these other vehicles, present compelling circulation numbers, and provide excellent customer service to the advertising client. They must be able to accept, position, produce and print the advertiser’s copy and images, with particular attention paid to reproduction quality.
Here was a very interesting piece of advice on www.PubCom.com from Bevi Chagnon, within a chapter in their book on preflighting, in this case on the ground rules for DTP or Desktop Publishing. They recommend that designers or creators, as many printers will admit is true, send both a press-quality PDF as well as the collected native or original DTP layout:
Today, the majority of print shops accept press-quality PDFs, and for many
types of jobs, printers prefer PDFs rather than native files. But I still recommend you provide both types of files:
Despite all the gains and benefits of computer-to-plate (CTP) imaging and digital design, the process of creating compelling packaging designs is actually more complicated than ever. In the days of film, it didn’t matter what creative application you may have been using — Adobe Illustrator or QuarkXPress, for example — because in the end the creative work became film, which any packaging manufacturer could accept.
Then came CTP, and film stepped aside and allowed digital workflow to take center stage. No longer was film trafficked; rather, digital files became the means for exchanging packaging content. And suddenly, it became increasingly important what design application a creative director may be using, and what types of digital file formats a package printer may (or may not) accept.
