Client approvals

Every project has a best before date, and like milk, when it goes bad it happens quickly. Something to consider are client approvals, clients are busy people too. But, sometimes clients forget that there are other factors in the production of their materials other than their signing off on a project. Try not to let your client drag their heels on approving or requesting revisions to a project. Educate your client as much as possible as to lead times required by the various service bureaus and other agencies involved that will effect the delivery of their project. It's also advisable to ensure that you are talking to the primary stake holders in the project if at all possible, the more middlemen involved the more of a logistical nightmare you'll have on your hands. This isn't meant as a derogatory statement but just a reminder of the facts. The more people that are between the designer and the final stake holder in the project the more potential there is for miscommunication, different interpretations, excessive revisions and delays.

Lead Times

How long will it take for your service bureau to process your work? If it's a project going to digital output, also know as a high end color copier, allow yourself about a week once the final proof has been signed off on. If the job is going to press and depending on the type of job it's best to allow between two to three weeks for the job to be finished. I've seen most service bureaus turn jobs around in less time than that but if you can't get a reliable estimate from your bureau those are good guesses as to time requirements. Things that will add time to a job include; trimming, binding, collating, folding, special varnishes and any additional treatements that the project may require. Other considersations may be stocks chosen for the project, if it's a standard paper chances are your service bureau will probably have it in stock or the local paper supply house will, but like most manufacturers today they will probably order the stock required for your job on an as needed basis. The simple fact is that carrying a large inventory costs money and it's far more profitable to turn the stock quickly and in order to do that most service bureaus will only order the stock for your job once it has been confirmed.

Does your service bureau do everything in house or are there portions of the job that need to be farmed out to another company? Not every agency can do everything, so out of necessity it has formed partnerships in order to meet their client's demands. Your agency may handle four and five color and spot color presses along with some finishing services such as trimming and saddle stitching but may outsource your perfect binding to another bureau because of the floor space required and the dust it produces or may also out source your short run digital jobs. Two things to consider in this area are; your job will now have the added expense of being handed off to another bureau and your service bureau will charge you a handling charge, also because there is now another middleman in the project there will be the added potential for miscommunication and delays. How you handle it becomes a bit of a trade off, if you allow your service bureau to handle the whole project and they do a good job, as most do, the the added expense may well be worth it. However if you can do most of the outsourcing yourself it will improve your bottom line but you'll also have to charge someone for your time in managing the project.

Proofing

Strange as it seems your local courier company is a major player in the proofing process. Every time you have to have a proof delivered to someone there is a cost in terms of time. If your service bureau sends you a proof of the job in the morning and you dutifully sign and return it immediately while the courier waits you will only lose one day, but in most cases the courier will drop the proof off at the reception desk and bolt, intent on making the next delivery. So if you're depending on hard proofs to be signed and delivered you can pretty well expect that you can write off two business days required just to shuffle material around the city. Also, if your service bureau has to outsource material for your project you had best factor an additional two days to handle their shipping requirements.

What you see on your monitor will not look the same as the print off of your ink jet printer nor a digital printer or an offset press. Each of these processes have different gamuts. Depending on the printer that you are using to run your in-house proofs which may have six individual ink cartridges, the standard cyan, magenta, yellow and black and possibly a light cyan and light magenta. A four color press will only have the standard CMYK mix, or you may be possibly running a job on a hexachrome press, six colors. Your ink jet has a wider gamut than the typical four color process color print that you get from you service bureau and considerably less than your color monitor. In short when you translate from one process to another there are going to be color and luminance differences and at times the best you can hope for is a reasonably close match. Considering how the final piece will be presented is an important part of the design and proofing process. For example process colors tend to be somewhat translucent in comparison to spot colors which becomes important in determining what kind of stock the job will be run on. Because process colors allow light to travel through the ink and bounce back from the substrate the stock that you print on will become important in the quality of your job. A dull newsprint quality of stock will gray and deaden the ink colors as opposed to a bright white paper that allows the colors to sparkle. What looks good on your monitor may not look as good as on your client's monitor, if you've taken the time to calibrate your monitor chances are your client hasn't even heard of the process. Monitors are effected by a variety of factors such as the type and age of the phosphors, ambient lighting conditions and the client's preferred monitor settings. Much like paper stocks viewing a proof under these conditions is subjective and all you can do is hope for a best guess. Ambient lighting also has an effect on the printing process, a piece designed to look good under the hood of a lighting booth may not fair as well under the blue-green fluorescent of your clients office or the yellow-red tungsten lights of the final viewer's armchair lamp. At the end of it all all you can do is to minimize the possible discrepancies and educate your client as to the shortcomings of the processes involved and try and work within their budgets.

Conversion Perversion

Every time you translate one file format to another you run the risk of conversion perversion, where despite your best efforts, well, something just goes wrong. Text might get shifted, a series of points may get dropped from a curve turning it into a straight line. Translation errors can occur from one brand of graphics package to another, from an old version of a graphics package to a newer one, when outputting to a RIP (raster image processor) or on occasion even just hitting print. Mishaps I've seen include; the Gulf of Mexico being filled from in from the Yucatan peninsula to the tip of Florida when converting from CorelDraw to Illustrator, a software package crashing when I've hit print because it can't translate its own filters to a raster image, corrupted PDF's failing part way through the RIP process and more. Things that you can do to alleviate any possible conversion problems include; choosing a service bureau that is reasonably current with it's RIP software and other packages and using industry standard software. There are a number of other good graphics packages out there but like any other industry there are companies that have grown strong enough to enforce a standard upon an industry. Whether or not this is a good thing isn't part of this debate at present, it's just reality, and the fact of the matter is that second comers to the game will always suffer from a certain degree of lag time while they try and reverse engineer the leader's processes. This ebb and flow of commercial superiority has changed over the last two decades that I've actively been involved in the industry and will probably do so again over the next two, but today there are certain leaders in the print industry that have established the criteria for graphic design. Get to know what the requirements and standards are of the industry, consult with your service bureau, and be prepared to continue learning on a daily basis in order to meet with the requirements of your clients.

Hopefully this will give some a bit more insight into making an aspect of the design process a little easier, those things that are potentially outside of your control.

Digital Paint Graphic and Web Design