mojoprime
Well-known member
these fascinate me. i've been a designer for 25+ years, and i can honestly say i never would have gotten where i am or been the business as long if i didn't rely on the advice, guidance and answers from my printers. i grew up in the newspaper business, and was always fascinated by the guys in the backshop with their vertical lightables, xacto knives, amberlith and wax machines. it always seemed like they were assembling an elaborate puzzle that only they knew the subject of and what they final image would be. to this day, i still approach design with that same awe and wonder, every time i start even the most basic form or the most complex report. as designers, our job is communication and i've always thought that inside every white page is a really good message waiting to get out.
you just have to see it, coax it out; do your job. but if there are so many errors or just simple mistakes that impede that process, then you've failed before you've even started. a lot of the designers send their stuff to print and then assume that's it, the end of their involvement, and don't care what happens once it gets there -- "just print it the way i sent it." um, no. it's our responsibility as designers to provide the printers with the best source materials we can, because their time -- just like ours -- is money. and as designers, we've all done things that don't pay (clean up this logo, reproduce this layout) but we do them so we'll get additional work...just like printers. so if we don't do our jobs, we're just passing along the same crappy treatment. look, we can't do our jobs without the printers; they have experience and institutional knowledge that we didn't get.
but we can learn. we've done it before. so it's up to us to ask why our file didn't work as we thought, or if there's a way we can clean up our files better, and so on. your printer can be your best friend (moving your job up on the sked, making small fixes for free) or your worst enemy. i prefer to work with them with the same respect i had for their vocation as i did as a kid. if this younger generation of designers can get past their own ego and sense of entitlement, hopefully they'll see that too.
you just have to see it, coax it out; do your job. but if there are so many errors or just simple mistakes that impede that process, then you've failed before you've even started. a lot of the designers send their stuff to print and then assume that's it, the end of their involvement, and don't care what happens once it gets there -- "just print it the way i sent it." um, no. it's our responsibility as designers to provide the printers with the best source materials we can, because their time -- just like ours -- is money. and as designers, we've all done things that don't pay (clean up this logo, reproduce this layout) but we do them so we'll get additional work...just like printers. so if we don't do our jobs, we're just passing along the same crappy treatment. look, we can't do our jobs without the printers; they have experience and institutional knowledge that we didn't get.
but we can learn. we've done it before. so it's up to us to ask why our file didn't work as we thought, or if there's a way we can clean up our files better, and so on. your printer can be your best friend (moving your job up on the sked, making small fixes for free) or your worst enemy. i prefer to work with them with the same respect i had for their vocation as i did as a kid. if this younger generation of designers can get past their own ego and sense of entitlement, hopefully they'll see that too.
