Confident in Your Content?

In the digital workflow for print and multimedia, graphic artist must think beyond design aesthetics and accept some of the responsibility that prepress suppliers once held

If any of your design work in the past decade has been for print, you’ve undoubt­ed­ly borne wit­ness to a rev­o­lu­tion unfolding–the advent of dig­i­tal con­tent cre­ation and computer-to-plate (CTP) print man­u­fac­tur­ing. Film went away and was replaced by the exchange of dig­i­tal files between design­er and printer. 

Digital files are now the means for deliv­er­ing con­tent to any num­ber of out­put possibilities–from tra­di­tion­al off­set print­ing to dig­i­tal print­ing, to Web sites, DVDs and CD-ROMs. The emer­gence of graph­ic design for new media forms simul­ta­ne­ous to the changes unfold­ing in print have put some bur­dens on the shoul­ders of graph­ic artists. It’s not enough these days to toil in your favorite desk­top pub­lish­ing appli­ca­tions, mak­ing “pretty pic­tures” for your employ­ers or cus­tomers, as the case may be. To best serve the process, you’ve got to be both design­er and pre­press operator–knowledgeable about best prac­tices in cre­at­ing con­tent for any medium.

The cost of sloppy production

Although print has been around far longer, design­ing for the Web is arguably a much sim­pler process than design­ing for print. It’s easy to make changes or fix­es to online con­tent. It can take mere minutes–even seconds–to make a change to a mas­ter file and re-upload it to a site. 

In the world of print, the stakes are much high­er. An hon­est, sim­ple error in a dig­i­tal file can bring the print pro­duc­tion process to an abrupt halt. Printers expect that the files design­ers sup­ply to them will be pre­pared properly–with all the ele­ments present and account­ed for, but more impor­tant­ly, opti­mized for print. A bad, or error-prone file–whether it’s a mag­a­zine ad, a post­card, a direct-mail piece, an insert, and so forth–that makes it all the way to the print­er will, undoubt­ed­ly, cost your com­pa­ny, or your cus­tomer, time and mon­ey to remedy. 

Ill-prepared files is “absolutely the biggest deal” in the print pro­duc­tion work­flow today, sug­gests Tom Clifford, pre­press pro­duc­tion man­ag­er, Banta Corporation, Menasha, WI. 

“You need to under­stand that a 30-second change in the design stage, on a mas­ter tem­plate, could become a 10-hour change after the pages have been sup­plied to the printer–or worse, a $100,000 change once the job has been printed,” Clifford stresses. 

Suzy Aycoth man­ages design, quality-control and plate­set­ting for Perfect Image Printing, Charlotte, NC. She sees, first-hand, the dis­par­i­ty in file for­mats com­ing through the door of her print shop, and she’s on the front lines when it comes to resolv­ing prob­lems res­i­dent in her cus­tomer­s’ files. 

Aycoth says that the file for­mat she prefers to receive from cus­tomers are native QuarkXPress files, but only 50 per­cent of cus­tomers sup­ply those files, and even then, she esti­mates that an aver­age 90 per­cent of all files arrive in some state of dis­re­pair. Depending on the inten­si­ty of the repair, Aycoth will rec­om­mend one of two options–have the cus­tomer make the fix on their end and resub­mit the file; or make the repair at the print­er and charge the cus­tomer for addi­tion­al pro­cess­ing time.

New challenges and responsibilities

So, how do you ensure that the con­tent you’ve cre­at­ed will repro­duce in print as you expect it to? By putting some sim­ple best-practices and quality-control mea­sures in place.

First, it’s impor­tant to know what the out­put inten­tions are. If it’s for print, you can bet you’ll need to pay par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to details such as col­or space, res­o­lu­tion set­tings, dimen­sions, trim and bleed, etc. The best way to ensure your under­stand­ing of how the file needs to be set up, con­tact the print­er and ask about its spec­i­fi­ca­tions. The most digital-savvy print­ers will expect you to meet the require­ments of cer­tain stan­dards. For exam­ple, a pub­li­ca­tion print­er to which you’re sub­mit­ting a mag­a­zine ad may require you to pre­pare your files accord­ing to the PDF/X‑1a stan­dard. Other print­ers may want a dif­fer­ent file for­mat, but it’s impor­tant to know what that is.

Knowing the specs is the first step, but ensur­ing that you’ve fol­lowed them to the let­ter is the crit­i­cal sec­ond step. Here’s where tech­nol­o­gy comes into play. For a rather low-cost invest­ment, graph­ic artists can imple­ment quality-assurance software–commonly known as “preflight” software. 

There are sev­er­al pre­flight devel­op­ers in the mar­ket, but many of them are robust solu­tions most appro­pri­ate for high-volume work­flows like you’d find at a com­mer­cial print­er. But there are a few solu­tions that are geared specif­i­cal­ly to the graph­ic design­er, such as Markzware’s FlightCheck Studio, a plug-in to QuarkXPress (ver­sions 4, 5 and 6)) that allows the design­er to des­ig­nate doc­u­ment parameters–called “Design Policies”–based on the printer’s spec­i­fi­ca­tions. For exam­ple, the design­er may des­ig­nate res­o­lu­tion and col­or space, and if he or she mis­tak­en­ly places a low-res graph­ic or an RGB image, the appli­ca­tion imme­di­ate­ly alerts the design­er. The fix can be made then and there, and design­er can rest assured that the file being deliv­ered to the print­er is in its best pos­si­ble condition.

“As client bud­gets con­tin­ue to tight­en, pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in con­cept, design and pro­duc­tion are more crit­i­cal than ever,” explains Michael Bachleda, pres­i­dent of Bachleda Advertising, Schaefferstown, PA. “Preflighting all our … print projects in house, before pro­vid­ing any­thing to the print­er saves us time lat­er. Those sav­ings more than pay for the cost of the soft­ware itself.”

Ensuring your marketability

As with learn­ing any new skill, edu­cat­ing your­self about best prac­tices in dig­i­tal file prepa­ra­tion takes time and ded­i­ca­tion, but it’s worth the effort.

“The increase in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, espe­cial­ly in pre­press, has been phe­nom­e­nal. It requires, though, a lit­tle more respon­si­bil­i­ty on the art director’s end,” Hipple fore­warns. “Once you’re done design­ing a prod­uct, it’s not done when it leaves your desk­top. It’s only done when it comes off the press. This is a pro­duc­tion process, and you need to edu­cate your­self on the total craft.”

“Even expe­ri­enced design­ers have trou­ble keep­ing up with the lat­est pro­duc­tiv­i­ty enhance­ments built into the lat­est Mac or PC oper­at­ing soft­ware. The more a design­er can trou­bleshoot, solve, and even avoid, pre­ventable pro­duc­tion prob­lems, the more valu­able the design­er is to the agency and the agency’s client base,” Bachleda sug­gests. “For small and mid-size shops, there is lit­tle time to train entry-level design­ers, so the more pro­duc­tiv­i­ty tools a design­er has in his or her pock­et, the more val­ue he or she can build into a job sup­port­ing higher-level design­ers, which hope­ful­ly trans­lates into faster-growing salaries and access to tasti­er projects.”

Gretchen Peck is a free­lance author who writes about the graph­ic arts and print­ing indus­tries. (This arti­cle was pro­vid­ed by Markzware.)