Need Advice re: Printing Student Projects

[Buttonpresser]

Not sure where to post this exactly but here it goes...

I own/operated a small digital print/design shop in a town with two mid-sized colleges. They've been sending their graphic design students down to our shop when they need non-standard prints done that the schools' print depts can't accommodate.

There are about 150-200 of these graphic design students that will pop down with their projects on a thumb drive. The files are far from press-ready and we will inspect the files and send them back out the door to go fix the files and return later. They may make 2-3 trips down to us before the file is printable. This takes about 20-40 minutes of "counter time" and all for a whopping $0.60 on the final bill. It's not always in-person visits, some will email us and a few will call.

We're losing a ton of time and revenue on these students. I've been weighing my options but I'm at a loss on how to stop this bleeding (of course I'm writing this durning their finals week when it's the worst).

Here's some options I'm weighing, feel free to add or modify your own ideas.

• Charge a minimum order price, say $5.00 and then waive that minimum for non-students (slightly unethical and doesn't really solve the problem).
• Require the professor to collect and inspect these projects and send them to us in a batch (professors don't seem to know how to create press-ready files either, facepalm).
• Tell professors that the graphic design students aren't welcome anymore (evil but an option).
• Print whatever it is they give me, if I can, regardless of it's "printability" and let them come back if it's wrong (still have the issue of multi-visits and low price tag.)

Any constructive advice is welcome.

 

[gordo]

IMHO, if there is no consequence to one’s actions then there is no incentive to change.

The teacher should confirm the correctness of the files before they’re released to you. Take the files. If they’re going to fail let them fail. When questioned, offer to provide the education that they’re not getting. Charge them and offer to refund the cost on their next order(s).

 

[PDL]

I think the professors should definitely be made aware of the problem. Maybe you could even prepare a document of guidelines and forward that to the professors to distribute to their students.

An extension of that could be to offer preflighting in house based on your established profiles and require a no errors report before you will except the job from students. You could place that $5.00 charge on each preflight as incentive to get it right the first (or second) time. Passing preflights get no charge. Files without a passing preflight can get printed but with a signed wavier on the print result.

 

[OffsetStorefront]

+1 on the idea of distributing written instructions to professor of how to make the file print-ready and then just printing the files as you get them, errors and all. I think it'd be a good learning experience to physically see how a file turns out on paper with various errors & oversights. You're not charging them a lot so there isn't much for them to get "mad" over.

 

[wonderings]

Not sure how involved I would want to get with a professor teaching this stuff. Many designers make nice stuff but have no clue about how it is all put together. The good ones do of course. We have a minimum charge of $10. We have a few big universities here and anything that comes in I inspect, say it is ok to print, will be ok with easy minor edits I can do or we tell them briefly what is wrong with it and that they need to fix it or what we can do with the file they have. I will not sit and teach them the basics of print or how to use Adobe CC. I have done that for some clients but they are clients with repeat work that pays the bills. Not sure what type of projects they are bringing in but you could make a very simple template. State what all jobs need and what your maximum print size is. So for us the maximum digital with bleeds is 12 x 18. Will give them a basic line template that shows how we want .125" of bleed, a safety margin and crop marks. Generally after that files come in fine, or at least close enough we can make something work with little effort.

 

[Puch]

Honestly, I used to face the very same problem for years, and continue to have similar headaches today from another perspective. I always choose the hard way, teaching them the basics, then suggesting some good reads to learn from. After some years I tried to ask for some compensation and it started working eventually. We charge them not just for the printing, but for the time we spend fixing their files, showing the proper way of file preparation.

Another studio I know installed low-cost workstations in the waiting room, where problematic customers can fix their own files. If a technical question arise, they help the customer and tick up the price a bit. People just love that they don't have to take the journey home and back for another try.

 

[BobRym]

Two solutions that may work for you. We are a digital only shop with various printers (colour is primarily handled on a Ricoh Pro7100X). We instituted a File Process charge many years ago to cover the time it takes to receive a file, store it, open it and send it to the appropriate printer for output. If we have to download a file from an FTP site - it's $5.00. This gets charged on top of any print charge as it takes just as long to do this for one print or hundreds. We don't make a "profit" on this charge but it does help to cover staff time dealing with customers and files. Alternately - we work with a local high school and their graphic arts course - we have the instructor batch all of the files and submit them to us and then charge a flat rate per sheet (these are standardized as 13"x19" and we use a 100lb. semi gloss text stock). This we do at a standard price per print. We output this 3 or 4 times each semester and usually 30 to 40 prints. I would output the work the way it is brought in and have the students do corrections or adjustments based on the printed output - just like we do when we are designing! It's part of the education process. Preparing a handout on print file preparation is not a bad thought either - working closely with the educators and students is good for both your firm, the instructors and the students. We have retained some of these students as customers once they have finished their course and are out in the workforce. We've already trained them to be our customers so easier for them to keep dealing with us than switching to an unknown firm.

 

[wonderings]

Another studio I know installed low-cost workstations in the waiting room, where problematic customers can fix their own files. If a technical question arise, they help the customer and tick up the price a bit. People just love that they don't have to take the journey home and back for another try.

I have always like date idea of having workstations customers could use, but the fact that you have to rent your Adobe CC software now makes that unrealistic unless you are bringing in a lot of money from the people who do not know how to properly setup their files.

I could see this working when you could buy a single license and it never expired, you would have computers out of date for a while but still a few year old version of Indesign, Illustrator and Photoshop are much better then most other software.

 

[Buttonpresser]

I will create a couple of sample files and then craft a carefully worded email to the professors. This email will outline the print guidelines that we require and the sample files will obviously match those guidelines. Some of the professors have already been given guidelines and don't seem to check these files before they come to us. All I can really do is reinforce the guidelines in that case.

Last night I also thought about putting together some simple how-to videos for our blog that walk students through some common issues (adding bleed, crop marks, switching to CMYK, and checking resolution). Maybe the professors can share those videos with their classes and help mitigate the "return customer" problem.

I think I can also ask that students submit their class projects via email only, this will cut down on the "counter time". I can also ask for an idea about the projects the professors intend to have us print so I can give them specific feedback before the students chem them up and poop them out.

Of course we need to start printing whatever it is the students bring us, which we kind of already do, but be a little harder on this practice.

Email to professors:

• State the problem we're facing w/o passing blame
• Clearly outline the printing guidelines for laser and wide-format prints
• Supply sample files that would pass our own preflight
• Supply links to troubleshooting videos on our blog
• Ask that students submit their files via email and wait for a pick-up alert (we'll print whatever they send, regardless of preflight pass/fail)
• Ask that professors submit an outline of their projects so we can supply more detailed guidelines

Thank you all for your input. Super helpful.

 

[michaelejahn]

I will create a couple of sample files and then craft a carefully worded email to the professors. This email will outline the print guidelines that we require and the sample files will obviously match those guidelines. .

Believe it or not, that is precisely what Time magazine titles have done to help design firms and advertising agencies and media buyers - they put up a portal that had guidelines.


http://www.direct2time.com/title/time/ad_portal_guide.html

http://www.direct2time.com/title/time/ad_portal_guide.html#Common Errors

http://www.direct2time.com/inc/Error_Desc/Unsupported_Fonts.html

 

[copyguy66]

I used to have a shop that did not have minimums and I had the same problem.
Customers would come in and spend an 30 minutes to an hour with one on my employees and only spend $5 for the final product.
Make your minimum high enough to compensate you for your time and materials.
I have a $50 minimum order with a $10 per file minimum as well.
Customers will abuse you as long as you let them.

 

[Jeff Duke]

Hey Buttonpresser,

The problem with graphic arts in schools is, they are great for designers but they don’t work for the printing industry. This is a perfect example. The professor doesn’t even know about layback, layout for two sided work, and probably don’t size and sc even angle.

i believe in communication, so I think it would be great if you sat down with him and show him what is needed for the pruning of the work. Also, the students need to know real world experiences. They need to understand that customers are expecting them to know what they are doing, the printers need them to know what they are doing and what the consequences are if they fail. The printers are not going to want and neither do they have time to run work back and forth.

Also, you should start charging for correcting. If you let the professor know your going to start charging heavy because the students need to take responsibility, maybe he will own his job and educate himself in those areas.

 

[davarino]

This was a very annoying problem we had at a shop that I CSR'd at years ago.

The easiest way of dealing with this is simply to hit them with a file opening charge if they can't output it. But I think I had a better way than that.

My solution was to give 5 minutes attention to the student's file and take the time to tell them that we would charge our minimum file opening charge of $10 and that if it needed more attention than 5 minutes we would go into instruction mode:

$60/hr (in quarter hour increments) with those first 5 minutes being counted into the first quarter hour. (Effectively an additional $5 for 10 more minutes of instruction.)​

If it was slick as a whistle, I told 'em that we were waiving the fee because it was a well done job and that we loved students getting it right. Might even show them around the shop a little. You never know where you can get good future workers and customers.

On the other hand, if it needed more work than 5 minutes we would go into instruction mode.

It takes a lot of self confidence to pull this one off... which you ought to have as an experienced digital worker.

You can see the various benefits of approaching students this way:

• Consequences of actions
• Letting them discover the limits of their instruction
• Letting them actually learn something
• Culling out the incompetent
• Encouraging the talented
• Not losing money

Sixty cents a copy is far too little to charge for the service of teaching someone a trade. Unless you want them to learn to buy printing by the pound.