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.
“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.
Markzware interviewed one of it’s valued customers, Mr. Valentin Ocheda and during taping, he deeply explained his usage of a neat Macintosh tool called, Default Folder X. Check out here how he uses this to semi-automate his preflight and graphic design workflow:
“Quality Control [via FlightCheck] on his desktop.”
Over at the Markzware’s Group on Linkedin.com, the popular professional social networking site, we posted an interesting topic and question- please join in!
How do you use preflighting in your workflow?
Here is a video interview of a graphic designer and for a large part he goes over how he preflights and the tools he uses (FlightCheck, PitStop, etc): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDcH8HXZhS4
Valentin from OCHEDA Graphic Creatives recently called in with a small support question. In assisting him, I learned of his great zeal for using FlightCheck Professional on every job that he produces in QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign. SO much so that we asked if we could interview him to learn more about his graphic design workflow and how he works with preflighting, PDF and DTP layout applications. Watch the English interview here:
If embedded video does not show up, click here. Continues below…
Earlier today we conducted a very interesting interview with a designer, which we will post tomorrow or in any event soon. He swore by FlightCheck throughout the graphic design process and always delivers to the printers an Enfocus Certified PDF- using some of the Enfocus kit to produce standards based PDFs which his customers (record labels) require… more on that story later, but it fits in with this news below nicely… (And a few simple questions for YOU at the end!)
Back when I wrote the Quark for InDesign Users articles, I was approached by Markzware, a company that makes several Quark and InDesign plugins. I know the folks over at InDesign Secrets love plugins, but I’ve never used any myself. Markzware kindly agreed to give me a copy of their plugin to try out and I thought I’d share with you some of my thoughts!
Install and Activation
For reference, I tested the Q2ID plugin on Windows XP SP2 with QuarkXpress 7.3 (Passport) and InDesign CS3.
If I am going to preflight, how do I do it? What criteria will I use, and where in the workflow should preflight occur? The answer: At every stage of the workflow. Native files should be verified before a document is converted to PDF. That file should subsequently be verified before it is sent to the supplier, and the supplier may want to verify it yet again before the file is imposed and plates are set.
Pity the poor souls that buy flood insurance after their homes have flooded. “Better late than never” can be a costly philosophy. “Better safe than sorry” makes more sense, doesn’t it?
The same logic applies to today’s modernized printing industry. Going direct-to-plate with digital technology means that even the slightest error can be costly, in terms of both time and money. Time is money, after all. You can’t afford to lose any, and with a simple preflight quality control process, you don’t have to.
We work and live in confusing and complex times. This is especially true for those who are involved in graphic design, photography, illustration and the other dozen or so disciplines that make up the graphics world.
As we prepare digital files steps need to be taken to make sure missing fonts and images are included, fonts are with the files, colors are converted to CMYK, and trapping is correct. Preflighting all aspects of digital files before PDFs are created increases the chance of error-free output.
