It was a little more than a year ago—while at the annual Design Thinkers conference hosted by the Registered Graphic Design Association in Toronto—when Michel Kurita was introduced to the Adobe Creative Suite and Adobe InDesign. Prior to the event, Kurita had been using QuarkXPress to create everything from reports and brochures to packaging, point-of-purchase displays, and trade-show collateral for the Canadian government. Kurita is a senior graphic designer, design and creative products development, Industry Canada, Government of Canada.

Enjoy a great article written by John Giles in the October issue of “Quick Printing Magazine.”

“Everyone says they are different. Their shop is different. Their market is different. Their customers are different. Yet as I visit and chat with hundreds of printers throughout North America each year, it quickly comes evident that there are more similarities than differences…”

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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.

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

Source: Press release issued by the company, unless otherwise noted.

June 10, 2008 – Rampage Systems of Waltham, MA announced that Version 11 of the Rampage Workflow System is shipping and improves the performance of PDF Trap Engine by as much as 75 percent. Rampage Systems introduced PDF Trap Engine in 2006 to help printers deal with PDF files containing transparent effects.

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.

Below is a press release from IT Enquirer on a recent, detailed ROI (Return On Investment) report they did on Markzware’s Q2ID or QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign conversion plugin. As you can see in this chart, a single license of Q2ID can have a first year ROI of over 1,000 %*! That is amazing. See exhibit from IT Enquirer report here:

* Make note: This report is using ONLY five files over a year period as an example and even with only so few, the ROI is over 1,000 percent- likely many publishers and advertising agencies will have many more than that, making the return on investment really incredible.