Prepress Tips for Designers

[gig0]

Don't think you are doing us a favor by imposing artwork. Stop that.

 

[Visualaid]

give us bleeds, give us high res files.

 

[dabob]

Call us . . . ask us . . . listen to us . . . don't argue with us . . . remember what we told you . . . and don't wait till you bring the job in . . .

 

[gig0]

Funny you say this. This week, I spent 1 1/2 hours on the phone trying to explain to a county government employee why his 120 page Quark file, with hundreds of low res PICT links wouldn't separate properly into a two color job. This job would entail 16 hours of fixing minimum, yet he kept insisting his last printer had no problems. I walked him through generating a press ready PDF on the phone and checking his work via separations preview in Acrobat, which confirmed why this guy was a tool. He simply refused to go through all the work to correct his file and continued to pull the "my last printer had no problems" card and how he has been doing this for 20 years.


I hope he comes across this because this post is for you, Gilbert. You are truly the epitome of a lazy county employee leeching off taxpayers. You suck and I hope you die in a fire.

 

[zombie]

Don't use 400% ink, just because you "know" it will look better. Always use overprint atribute and spot color for dielines and UV varnish elements.

 

[MacTwidget]

When I request a vector file of the RGB.png you supplied... Placing it in Illustrator and saving it as an .ai or .eps doesn't count!

 

[Keith]

Don't think you are doing us a favor by imposing artwork. Stop that.

And stop sending me artwork with crop marks! It messes up MY impositioning!

 

[Al Ferrari]

IF the crop marks are symmetrical, in Preps that can be handled all in one swoop by modifying run list pages to "centered." That's the one I happen to use.
But something like it would work even when manually creating impositions in a page layout application like Quark, or Indy.

Al

 

[Russ_G]

"Registration" is not a color!

 

[dabob]

"white" type should NEVER be set to overprint

 

[Visualaid]

Funny you say this. This week, I spent 1 1/2 hours on the phone trying to explain to a county government employee why his 120 page Quark file, with hundreds of low res PICT links wouldn't separate properly into a two color job. This job would entail 16 hours of fixing minimum, yet he kept insisting his last printer had no problems. I walked him through generating a press ready PDF on the phone and checking his work via separations preview in Acrobat, which confirmed why this guy was a tool. He simply refused to go through all the work to correct his file and continued to pull the "my last printer had no problems" card and how he has been doing this for 20 years.


I hope he comes across this because this post is for you, Gilbert. You are truly the epitome of a lazy county employee leeching off taxpayers. You suck and I hope you die in a fire.

and i bet this guy gets paid a sh%tload more than we do.

 

[tommrz]

Convert your fonts to outlines but don't expect me to make type changes.

 

[Fatboysmart]

MS Word is for typing letters... not for making print ready full color newsletters.

 

[gordo]

MS Word is for typing letters... not for making print ready full color newsletters.

Oh ye of little faith:

Save as PDF - Word - Office.com

My sympathies.

Gordo

 

[LoneGoose]

Don't expect foil-blocked type that's barely 2mm tall to come out crisp and clear without filling-in.

 

[LoneGoose]

No, I can't remove the 'Shutterstock' watermark from your stolen stock-photos...

 

[sigurarm]

I wrote something about this a while ago as a guest blogger. Maybe someone finds something useful in it. There is a pdf downloadable which can be sent to beginners:

Prepress tips for graphic designers | David Airey, graphic designer

 

[Chris Halt]

One of our clients has a "designer" who has snookered them into believing she is all-print-knowing for years. This designer does a beautiful job of using "Collect for Output" in Quark… one CfO folder for each and every page of a 300+ page catalog. Yes, every page of the catalog is a SEPARATE Quark doc, times 300+. If you are really into relinking artwork this is your dream job.

I will light a candle for everyone on this thread…

 

[JoeatData]

Stop selecting Spreads when you produce your pdf.

At least listen to our instruction that will assist you instead of yelling at us saying, "don't tell me how to do my job, I have 20 years experience."
Sorry, your job is still not correct, obviously you've been doing it wrong for 20 years.

Another one that's good is I will have a customer working with indesign.....have black type through-out the paragraph, then all of a sudden have a sentence that's RGB black or registration.

I recently had a time where a designer working with indesign asked me how to print lasers.

I have also created a screen caption step-by-step, with spoon fed numbers in a pdf on how to produce a pdf that we will supply to customers/designers.
I've been asked do we add bleed, how much bleed, what are your resolution settings? This is after they received the instructions.
Did you receive the pdf of our required spec's? Did you read it? Did you put in the info as shown?

Somtimes you want to find the highest building and jump. Other times you just want to jump into the phone and slap them silly.

 

[strido]

No, creep is not the guy that hangs over your cube in the morning. It means that I can't saddle-stitch 88 single 5.5x8.5 pages into your latest golf fundraiser booklet.