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.
Doug Rosen, product manager for Markzware recently made a nice little product overview movie for our tools which specifically work with QuarkXPress. You can watch the neat little movie, made in Apple KeyNote and finalized in iMovie here:
These products include;
ID2Q or InDesign to QuarkXPress conversion MarkzTools, which fixes bad or corrupted Quark Projects
and FlightCheck Professional- your preflight tool for checking some 50 file formats such as QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign, Illustrator and PDF to name a few!
DesktopMedia would like to thank Markzware, the leading software developer in preflight and file utilities for creative workflows for their generous donation of FlightCheck Professional, FlightCheck Designer and Q2ID to the DesktopMedia training lab. Not only will we put this to good use exposing and teaching as many professionals as possible, but, in the coming months we’ll be writing about how this powerful tool can help your organization!
Preflight and Conversion Tools For Document Content - MARKZWARE
Check out Markzware for all their latest offerings. Remember, the earlier in the your workflow you can include quality control the greater the success rate of your production files! Flightcheck Professional can review more file formats than you think — InDesign CS3, Quark 7, PDFs, even Microsoft Office files!!!
Indeed there’s no shortage of workflow tools used to create, color correct, optimize, verify and exchange content bound for print. The print industry certainly isn’t lacking in technology to support the all-digital workflow. But what may still be missing is a commitment to better educate the customer - teaching them how and why they need to create “good files” for print — and a willing shift in responsibility.
Community newspapers and their printers transition to the digital production workflow with the aid of inexpensive software tools
There was a time not long ago when the print world shook a little in its boots. The digital age was upon us, and stressors like the Internet threatened to make print virtually obsolete. Looking back, it was a silly fear, for not only has digital content proved not to be a threat to the printed word, digital content creation and production has proved to be one of the greatest enablers to those distributing print.
Content abounds at small to large organizations alike. The challenge for St. Louis businesses is to reproduce information in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible.
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.
The success of print projects today largely depends upon two things: the efficiency of the workflow and the quality of the content. Depending on where in the print manufacturing workflow you reside, you may receive digital content for any number of sources — some, more experienced in creating digital files for print than others.
