InReview: FlightCheck Designer by Erica Gamet

“A good designer is aware of what happens to each job down stream in the workflow. A great designer ensures that each job will stay afloat throughout the workflow. FlightCheck Designer puts the control designers love into an application that lets them hand off only the most perfect files…”

Read more pages 59-61.

Social Networking is growing by leaps and bounds and it makes sense- after all, it is nothing more than good old fashioned networking (hand-shaking) with a virtual wrapper on top of it! Get started today.

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Markzware, the leader in file conversion and preflight software, has a Twitter account! This popular social networking and micro blogging site has proven very useful for designers and you can “follow” people and companies by signing up for a free account. Follow us today on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Markzware

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Last week we covered a very important step that should be done before using FlightCheck Professional to preflight jobs which was about the Ground Controls in a post titled, “Preflighting 101 - Part 3; FLIGHTCHECK Professional v6 Concepts- a. Ground Controls”. Today we will move right along and cover the last three steps in the preflight process with FlightCheck; Inspecting a Document, Viewing the Results and Collect for Output (Packaging):

Preflighting 101 - Part 4
IIII b. Inspecting a Document

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.

What Does Preflighting The Design Mean?

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.