Going Backward? [slight rant]

[Joe]

...but Failer's example [unintentionally] supports my point

How in the world do you figure that supports your point? He pointed out what happens when a designer leaves unused objects on the page. He was lucky. It was just plate re-makes. It could have been a full press re-run.

 

[M. R. Horton]

Joe,

I was referring to the keepaway in the lower left hand corner.
What is the difference between a "keepaway" which I am used to hearing and a "cutback" which I am not?

 

[Tech]

How in the world do you figure that supports your point? He pointed out what happens when a designer leaves unused objects on the page. He was lucky. It was just plate re-makes. It could have been a full press re-run.

The point I was making is that his screenshot is a sample that represents the nature and simplicity of "unclean" files we often seen on our end. Simple book interiors might have 10 Illy files and largest books might be hundreds. IF you guys don't have the time, what make you think designers do?

Wow, where to even start?

I have to disagree with your assertion that most designs aren't complicated enough to require transparency being kept live as long as possible. Maybe with the kind of work and customers you have that might be true, but at the shops I've worked at we get some really complicated designs that would be a nightmare if flattened too early. I find that designers overuse and misuse transparency all the time. Besides, the whole point of a PDF workflow is to not flatten until the RIP is creating the plate dots. A modern APPE workflow makes things a whole lot easier when dealing with transparency.

Creating perfect files is the designer's responsibility, especially if they want the best price from the printer. If the designer has no problem paying extra charges for fix time, then fine, but most will gripe about it when they see an extra charge on their final bill. Would you say that an architect is just supposed to be concerned with how a building looks? No -- they have to ensure that it can be built and be structurally sound. Perfection from designers might be a stretch - there are some things that they cannot know depending on the printer's workflow, but they should be able to get 95%.

People on the upstream are finding ways to cutback. You are welcome to charge more. Sooner or later more jobs will go oversea [yes, even for 1/1], then don't complaint about losing jobs. BTW, have you try hiring designers that are both creative and prepress experience? Assuming you know Adobe products well, can you create digital art masterpieces? Two very different things. I wouldn't be going to you and request for a Mona Lisa painting either.

In the perfect world, designers would know what scripts/actions are for and clean up their files. In reality, most don't use it nor care enough to learn them. In case you guys never met geeky designers, they rather spent time thinking about colors/motifs/art/visual communications....last thing on their minds would be how to run a script or remove empty text spaces with fonts not embedded. What is cool to prepress gurus aren't so interesting to designers. I'm willing to take a leap that it's likely true vice versa.

Most designers don't see it as their responsibility to provide "clean" files [when was the last time you met one?]. They stop messing with the files when the jobs are approved, signed off and got paid... Lastly, I hope you are not assuming architects work alone and have no one to remind them about safety issues/materials usage/environmental factors/etc. because you are stretching this analogy.

 

[Joe]

In the perfect world, designers would know what scripts/actions are for and clean up their files. In reality, most don't use it nor care enough to learn them.

Well, you finally said something that makes sense.

How about if we in prepress just let all of the problems and mistakes go through? We'll see if you "care" then and trust me you will.

The point I was making is that his screenshot is a sample that represents the nature and simplicity of "unclean" files we often seen on our end. Simple book interiors might have 10 Illy files and largest books might be hundreds. IF you guys don't have the time, what make you think designers do?

Your point doesn't make sense as it's an example of what happens when designers do exactly what you are saying it should be OK to do.

We don't have time because you've more than likely sent it in late and still demand delivery on the promised delivery date based on getting the job to us on time and supplying "press ready" files. haha

And you need to have a serious discussion with the person that told you that PDF is the be all end all of files and that you should be able to create junk and make a PDF that is magically perfect. If you do things right and make a PDF you will have a good PDF. If you do things wrong and make a PDF you will have a bad PDF. Pretty simple, huh?

Simply put...your prepress guy is doing a helluva good job. I would like to have him working with me.

And don't take our bitching personally. We just get tired of it day after day after day after day...etc...

 

[naplajoie2000]

Now you have hit a nerve. We deal with a couple customers that use a particular prepress supplier whom shall remain nameless, that supplies us with PDf files that are always distilled .ps files saved out in PDF 1.3. We rip these damn things into Esko and they are all chunked out, and they expect us to try to do pullouts for perfect binding on crossovers, and try to trap these files is a nightmare when Esko keeps trying to trap every little chunk.

As for small type on rich black (we use 40, 30, 20, 100) - we white frame all small serif type .0007 and do a 3/c holdback of .0015 for sheetfed and .003 on our webs. This seems to work out for our pressmen, and it looks much cleaner.

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

@Tech do you remember the taining trainers rant?

@Tech do you remember the taining trainers rant?

In the perfect world, designers would know what scripts/actions are for and clean up their files. In reality, most don't use it nor care enough to learn them. In case you guys never met geeky designers, they rather spent time thinking about colors/motifs/art/visual communications....last thing on their minds would be how to run a script or remove empty text spaces with fonts not embedded. What is cool to prepress gurus aren't so interesting to designers. I'm willing to take a leap that it's likely true vice versa.

Most designers don't see it as their responsibility to provide "clean" files [when was the last time you met one?]. They stop messing with the files when the jobs are approved, signed off and got paid... Lastly, I hope you are not assuming architects work alone and have no one to remind them about safety issues/materials usage/environmental factors/etc. because you are stretching this analogy.

..do you remember the taining trainers rant? In some ways it does boil down a bit to the same thing.

Here in sweden there used to be a media programme for 16-18 year olds. The teachers in these programmes were usually art teachers. What has evolved is that because there was no technical people to teach the designers... designers with design degrees were trained by non technical people who praised self expression and cursed technicians who limited their their creativity resulting in graduated designers (and institutes) with little appreciation for any technical knowledge.

This year media is split in four directions, one of these directions is "industry technical programme" (freely translated, where graphic production, prepress and print production will be a special careeer path)…*then there is a social science programme, focus on writing content or theoretical side of media…*a technical programme, mainly tangented to IT and web services,…*and an asthetic (art) programme, focusing on the personal expression (and probabbly resenting technicians ;p)

This probably means that there is going to be a variety of entry points and competence levels. This is why forums such as this one is so valuable to educate people irrespective of their past experience and know how.

 

[mojoprime]

as a designer -- and someone who hires them -- i look for talent, but i also look for technical expertise. i can quickly tell who's got a little of both. after 21+ years in the business, it's hard to hide a turd. so, where does that leave us? well, we're a fast turnaround, high-volume in-house creative department. not only do i have my own fiery and Xerox 700 to contend with, but i send jobs to many different printers and many different prepress workflows and RIPs all over our city.

i need to know my files are going to RIP and come out like i intended. as a designer, that's my job. that's what they pay me for. i can't balance the books, and if i covered up an entry in a ledger with liquid paper (akin to covering an object with a white box), well, someone would know. and yes, i notice these days they don't teach technical skills. and i also notice that every design job gets 100+ applicants. so, who do i hire? the great designer with the great skills. if you don't have both, i won't hire you. and a lot of places won't either. why should they? there are other designers out there with the technical know-how to do their job correctly and efficiently. They are legion, and they are hungry to work.

i try to tell young designers that design isn't creative sessions on beanbags and playing Foosball. it's work, and there are crappy parts to it. but it's part of the job. And cleaning up after yourself is one of the parts. i'm sure you've seen a great pressman work. they take it like you kicked their kid if there's something wrong with the output, and will spend forever to fix it. well, as things go more and more digital and automated, designers are taking some of the work that used to be the purview of pressmen. back in the old days, you used to apprentice before you worked your way up. pressmen were the designers, copy editors and printers.

So, if nothing else, you owe to the industry you’re privileged to be a part of to make sure you have that same attention to detail.

Or, better than that: don’t clean up your files. Eventually, it will come back and get you, something will get stuck or blow up the RIP, and something will end up costing money. And if it’s because you never learned to zip your fly and tuck your shirt in like a big boy, I’ll fire you and hire someone who does. That’s just how it goes.

 

[M. R. Horton]

mojoprime,

Thanks for weighing in from a designer/manager point of view.

I hope the designers you mentor will take your advice seriously, it could easily be adapted to any career, whether they are "cut out" for graphic design or not.

 

[mojoprime]

i appreciate the work of those that came before me, and also those that work in the trenches with me. none of us have any extra time, we're all stretched thin these days as we try to make the same or larger margins with less staff and resources.

so it seems the height of arrogance -- pardon my brisk tone -- but to assume that someone else further down the line will clean up your mistakes is akin to letting them eat cake.

you made the mess. if you don't know how to clean it up, ask. if you still don't know, taco bell is hiring for the late shift.

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

Ty mojo…*I guess life gets unbalanced as clean jobs just swoosh past and we hardly touch them, an "bad" jobs take too much time (and usually are associated with the customer is gonna whine about all being too expensive anyway).

 

[mojoprime]

Ty mojo…*I guess life gets unbalanced as clean jobs just swoosh past and we hardly touch them, an "bad" jobs take too much time (and usually are associated with the customer is gonna whine about all being too expensive anyway).

ugh. i hate that. the economy has just screwed us all. we fix the jobs we would have flushed back to the designers because we're afraid to lose the work as a whole.

it's going to get better. i just hope everybody makes it through to the other side.

 

[[email protected]]

Education is lacking technical component

Education is lacking technical component

The KU Design Department is churning out graduates every semester here who don't know what a bleed is, what trapping means, what Photoshop and Illustrator are used for, and how resolution affects their output. I am surrounded by students who make pretty pictures but don't know the first thing about how to manage fonts or colors. We have plotters, laser printers, and Epson proofers at their disposal, but no one teaches them the basics. It's a free-for-all and they do the stupidest things, day in, day out. If a file doesn't print, they try to open it in Acrobat, if that doesn't work, they try Illustrator, if that fails, Photoshop. There's no rhyme or reason to their workflow and half of them don't know the difference between InDesign and Keynote.

I feel for you guys and I'm eternally grateful not to be in prepress anymore because I know what you are up against and I know it's not improving. I've tried to throw my experience out to them and offer constructive suggestions to make their job better, but nobody cares because there's no repercussion to doing it wrong. Here if they print something and it looks wrong, they blame the printer, too. I spend my days walking them through the print workflow or proofing workflow, proving that it is user fault, but I don't have the support of the faculty as none of them want to go near it for fear of revealing their weaknesses.

Anecdotally, it's been suggested that our grads are having a hard time finding employment because they lack the technical strengths, but it has yet to invigorate any change in curriculum.

Good luck.

 

[mojoprime]

wow. that's just staggering to even read. i simply don't understand that.

and i'd be all for the prepress and printers out there making the extra money by fixing the files, but you know, *KNOW*, that folks are blaming the printer or saying they won't pay extra for it, when the problem is standing next to them, drinking a skinny latte.

 

[maynardsayswhat]

Though, honestly, I always hated the old "apprentice" style when I was just starting it's starting to seem smarter and smarter. New grads starting out by manually ganging business cards or typesetting invoice forms would educate the heck out of most newly graduated designers.

So many entry level people expect to be offered art director positions right out of the gate. I've interviewed possibly hundreds of folks with this mindset. Talent will only get you so far without the craft to see the vision through.

 

[mojoprime]

see, i have to agree with you. i did paste up with a waxer and developer, and a handfuls of "e, s, d, g" characters on my fingers as i proofed pages on the lightable. and i always went home with chartpak lines on the bottoms of my shoes.

i can't imagine working prepress, but you're right. if they actually saw how difficult some things are, or at least, that work goes into the project when it leaves their screens, they might pay more attention to it all. i'm on a designers' forum too, and the folks who have been doing it for a bit are all pretty much agreeing with us here. more time in the backshop, in addition to time in front of the machine.

 

[maynardsayswhat]

I'd be very interested to see other forum discussions on this topic if you don't mind sharing =)

Perhaps it's time that the professionals started demanding some minimal technical education from our source institutions. Their students don't know enough to understand what they're missing out on (while paying out). And the schools themselves seem uninterested in adding production information to their programs. If the industry is to have qualified entry level talent, we need to be sure they're being educated properly. I'm sure they'd be more likely to change if a concerted demand was placed upon them.

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

If we look in our history books it was geaography teachers that made geography a school subject, by only allowing proffesional geaography teachers. I think the time is coming when media will be a general subject…*but we must together make sure it is NOT untill people understand what they teach. I hear of primary school teachers that teach children how to do word processing and for full marks you have to use many fonts and many colours and you get bonus marks for using word-art. :S

 

[mojoprime]

yeah, i've heard about that too. ugh.

sorry it took me so long to get back. busy, and we just got the 700 installed. which, of course, is a mixed blessing.

the forum thread is here:

tidying up - Graphic Design Forum

by the by, there's a printing section on that forum as well, and though i don't want you to leave here to go there, it might be interesting some times to peruse the site and see the kinds of questions folks are asking. it's a lot like here -- old salts mixed with greenhorns.

 

[maynardsayswhat]

Thanks for the link. Damn their forums are slow-loading for me.

Their printing forum has a different purpose than this one it seems. A different point of view. I doubt I'll see many komori operators over there =)

Cheers!

 

[mojoprime]

Thanks for the link. Damn their forums are slow-loading for me.

Their printing forum has a different purpose than this one it seems. A different point of view. I doubt I'll see many komori operators over there =)

Cheers!

yeah, i know. i thought it was just my connection. and you're right -- it's a different perspective. but hopefully some of them will come over here and listen to the advice you guys give -- i know that's why i'm here, and i've been doing this 22+ years.

never too old to learn something new...