Wednesday Moan..........

ajr

Well-known member
You supply me a PDF I pre-flight check over proof back, then you find type amends that could have been done before you even sent me the stupid job. Then you expect me to do them because you haven't got time!! (in Pitstop)!!!!

Feel better now!
 
I know that feeling.
Are other industries like this?

My own Tuesday moan:

Customer: I sent you open documents so that you can edit them, we have a ton of changes.

*opens email*
*finds 15 PDFs attached*

Customer: yes those are editable files, the PDFs are not password protected!


Ranks right up there with the customer who supplied a fashion catalogue (192 pages) on USB harddisk. Why? Because the files are kind of huge. Which is what you get when you "design" them in Photoshop and save as layered TIF uncompressed. RGB of course, so that black text (set in a font we do not own and the customer naturally cannot give us) will be a problem. Oh and of course that shade of smudge brown shall be PANTONE something.
What do you mean you cannot do that in a reasonable amount of time? And why do you advise against making that a saddle stitched catalogue?
 
i think i nearly have to pitstop 90% of files i get now, getting sad, beyond moaning, rope looming
 
Can I ask a question? Do you guys charge for major / minor prepress changes, corrections etc? We are very strict in South Africa - Ive yet to meet a printer that will correct for free - even small changes and also they all simply refuse to accept your job if it is not setup correctly - They all, we all say - It is either setup or it isn't - if not you pay for redesign. This is weird since we are not a booming economy and the margins are very small and extremely competitive. Obviously, this gets customers upset if you are honest about it - so now many of us just hide that cost in the quote.
 
We are very strict in South Africa - Ive yet to meet a printer that will correct for free - even small changes and also they all simply refuse to accept your job if it is not setup correctly - They all, we all say - It is either setup or it isn't - if not you pay for redesign. This is weird since we are not a booming economy and the margins are very small and extremely competitive. Obviously, this gets customers upset if you are honest about it - so now many of us just hide that cost in the quote.

Be thankful for that. Here in Germany there are 2 kinds of commercial printers: the ones with large online shops that are very strict in what they accept (like your example) and the rest, who for the most part never bill for this kind of work. And even if they wanted to, they usually get "but the last shop never complained or billed me for that!".
 
It amazes me how many times a client will send us a PDF, we will pre-flight it, and send it right back to them, and they will find errors. It is as if they don't look them over until after we send them back. Over and over again this happens.
 
It amazes me how many times a client will send us a PDF, we will pre-flight it, and send it right back to them, and they will find errors. It is as if they don't look them over until after we send them back. Over and over again this happens.

Boy do I know what your talking about . . we have a client, they have a real in house design department (they purchased an existing agency) and they only accept 100% accuracy 50,000 sheet run packed in 500's and that's not 499 or 501 but 9 times out of ten they send us a file and we either find something wrong with it, i.e. the wrong size etc. or send them back the proof and then they proof read it and have us making changes . . . I guess their 100% perfect standard only exists outside of their building . . . oh well at least we can bill them for the corrections . . . .:confused:
 
As long as you can bill them and they pay the bill, why do you complain? :)


I wasn't complaining about being able to bill them . . . I was complaining about the double standard of requiring perfection from their vendors but not from their in-house personnel . ..
 
I live in the land of desperation for work so bad they don't bill for much of anything I do. I'm the ghost employee.
 
I wasn't complaining about being able to bill them . . . I was complaining about the double standard of requiring perfection from their vendors but not from their in-house personnel . ..

I have experienced that many times, in many different ways.

Customer wants us to make changes to his stationary. Move that text 1mm to the left, align this there, I don't like the way the zero looks in this font, can't you draw it differently? A quick estimate and offer for this corrections (really cheap, like $5 / hour) made all of this changes moot and we print as is.


We do typesetting and layout for a customer, a monthly publication.
Customer wants us to lower his bill. We say the only way we could do that would be if we stopped the layout/typesetting work. So now the customer does this in-house. When we did it, we would get all sorts of complaints about errors in the text, or when - heaven forbid - a paragraph did not align properly. Now there are errors all over the place, font changes inside paragraphs that are at best aligned to the paper edge ... black text on even blacker images, so that you cannot read it properly, you name it. Our layout department sees the first issue of that thing and bursts out laughing, then cries. Even one of this mistakes would have meant a complete re-print, but the customer is super-happy with it. Sometimes you just lose.
What is even more funny: the person that is responsible for the layout at the customer is the person who always found the most miniscule errors and mistakes in our layouts.

Walk a mile in someone else's shoes and ...

It's like the reversal of the robustness principle: be perfect in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. They demand perfection from others, they produce (sorry) garbage themselves.
 
I have been trying something for a while…

Business has slowed down a lot and Ive been trying to move our main stream of income to design work and layout - we have good staff for that - but like so many of you say - it means nothing 'cos as soon as the client find out you are charging them to make corrections etc they freak out.

So now I just don't do anything that will make us look bad if the client says we did it - If they are not willing to pay for something to look good then I refuse the job. And what freaks me out even more is for some reason you get more respect and business that way then the other way.

If clients kick back I use the doctor analogy - Would you ask your doctor to lower the bill if it meant he didn't treat you quite as well etc etc… No? Oh - so like toronor said, all of a sudden the corrections and colors that were so critical become void when there is an extra $35 on the price to make it look really good etc… sorry - I'm not interested… go somewhere that will print you stuff to look bad… if you do business with us - we promise to break our backs for you if you promise to just let us do our job at a fair price … and wonder of wonders - this seems to be working - getting better quality clients, fewer clients but more work per client - designers are busier etc etc… its a very weird model but seems to work.
 
My favorite is when they provide a PDF with all text converted to outlines and they want type changes. So much fun.........
 
My favorite is when they provide a PDF with all text converted to outlines and they want type changes. So much fun.........

Oh oh oh!
We had a catalogue (500+ pages) and the customer wanted to adapt it to a different market, i.e. change all € inside the PDF to $ (and EUR to USD).
I do not know any software that does search&replace inside a PDF, do you? :)
 
Oh oh oh!
We had a catalogue (500+ pages) and the customer wanted to adapt it to a different market, i.e. change all € inside the PDF to $ (and EUR to USD).
I do not know any software that does search&replace inside a PDF, do you? :)

Ha ha!! You could probably get the replacing text right - but I really don't know ANY system that will do the currency conversion also!!
 
That hurts!

Oh oh oh!
We had a catalogue (500+ pages) and the customer wanted to adapt it to a different market, i.e. change all € inside the PDF to $ (and EUR to USD).
I do not know any software that does search&replace inside a PDF, do you? :)
 

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