By Mary Gay Marchese

Note: This is the third in my series of guest posts. Mary Gay Marchese is the public relations director of Markzware. Marchese writes press releases, feature articles, presentations and reports as she networks with numerous media contacts for the printing, publishing and graphic arts industries. Mary Gay can be reached at pr@markzware.com. — Leslie

As a graphic designer, has this ever happened to you?

The scenario: You’ve sent your marketing masterpiece that you have meticulously designed to your printer. The deadline is tight, but you made it. Then the phone rings. It’s your printer calling to let you know they are having problems printing your piece. You are about ready to scream because the client is waiting to get this piece out to his customers.

What are some of the problems, you ask the printer. The response: You’ve sent low-resolution graphics, and have missing files and graphic items that have the wrong color space. What’s more, the job has missing or stylized fonts. “Ugh,” you say. “How come I didn’t know the file I created and designed was improperly prepared and has become a can of worms?

The reason is that the job that was created was not ‘designed’ correctly.

The word ‘design’ means more than making a product look pretty. Of course, a beautiful piece is very important. But possibly more significantly, is how the piece works and functions. The ‘design’s’ performance is the result of the designers objectives in terms of getting the reader to ‘think something’ and to ‘do something’.

To ensure the desired performance, it is imperative that the ‘mechanical design’ is accurate. Wikipedia’s definition of ‘design’ includes this statement: ‘… Designing normally requires a designer to consider the aesthetic, functional, and many other aspects of an object or a process, which usually requires considerable research, thought, modeling, interactive adjustment, and re-design…’

What preflighting software does is assist the ‘right brained’ designer, by providing a logical /mechanical software solution that does the left-brained work for him/her. Preflighting is a logical process. This process needs to be included within the overall design and construction of the piece to be printed. The end objective needs to be thought out well in advance. That is, that the piece will print as expected. Because, if this doesn’t happen, the entire design concept is worthless.

In the new era of digital design, graphic artists must think beyond aesthetics and accept some of the responsibility that prepress and printers once held. The idea of a quality control check, or preflight provides in macro terms the benefit of “lean” manufacturing for both designers and printers.

Preflighting for print and establishing an effective workflow also includes:
• identifying defective products
• eliminating overproduction
• excessive
• reducing work-in-process inventory
• avoiding over-processing
• stopping unnecessary movement of people and of products
• and waiting

Graphic artists of days gone by may have had it easier than their contemporary counterparts. Primarily, they could concentrate on the aesthetics of great content, allowing others—prepress and print production people, for example—to deal with the mechanics of producing it.

But the role of today’s graphic artist is a bit more complicated, thanks to the introduction of new electronic media and a shift of responsibilities. By and large, “prepress” has fallen by the wayside, leaving it up to creative professionals to be both designers and technicians, and to bridge the gap between design conception and final reproduction.

Clearly, a design’s destination (print, online, CD-ROM, and so forth) determines how a file should be created. A document bound for print will have different resolution, color-space, and trim-and-bleed requirements, for example, compared to content meant for the Web. Knowing the output intentions is important, but ensuring that digital files meet those specifications is equally as critical.

The bottom line is to follow the basic rules of print production, preflighting utility programs should be used to check designs. A systematic check of files before they go to a print vendor or are printed in-house is the best way to ensure error-free output.

One of the easiest ways to save is to pay close attention to prepress expenses. The costs of film, direct-to-plate or creating PDF files for print are enormous. And when there is a problem resulting in the job to be re-printed the costs add up, exponentially.

The printed word is a very reliable format for reaching potential audiences. Creating eye-catching flyers and marketing material has been greatly enhanced by digital technologies. Page layout programs, such as QuarkXPress and Adobe’s InDesign, have helped streamline the design and production process, which encompasses acquiring materials, designing the piece and checking the integrity of the file before final print.

Preflighting the design just takes moments. Those few seconds can save graphic professionals hours of misery fixing problems that will show up after film or plates are created. The financial savings in time and materials can be tremendous to marketers eager to get the message in the hands of potential new customers.

A note from Leslie: I firmly believe that one of the things that separates a design professional from an amateur with a copy of Adobe’s Creative Suite is the ability to send technically correct files to press. Markzware makes this a lot easier.

By Julie Roads of Writing Roads

Note: This is the second in my series of guest posts. Julie Roads is a professional copywriter with over 15 years of writing and creative communication experience. We met at a professional networking event and have since become colleagues and friends. To find out more about Julie, including how you can hire her to write for you, visit her web site at WritingRoads.com. — Leslie

Guilty as charged — I resisted joining Facebook because I lumped it in with myspam, sorry, I mean myspace. As of this writing, there are 70,000,000 (+/- 1) people on Facebook, and a colleague talked me into it, so I joined last Friday. I now have 38 friends.

If you aren’t on Facebook, let me fill you in — it’s addictive. But, besides that, it’s a phenomenal networking tool. I have reconnected with the likes of 38 people (at last count), and five of them quickly became client prospects — strong client prospects. Do the math, that’s just over a 13% return rate…not bad.

The best thing about Facebook is that, like LinkedIn — another favorite — there is no spam. You can’t get access to other members without their permission, and all correspondence goes through Facebook channels; you only get member emails with their consent. However, unlike LinkedIn, you can search for old high school buddies. It’s Facebook, only yearbook style. This is the genius part for me. Even though it’s been years, these are people that I grew up with, and a strong bond exists. Not to get mushy, but — it’s been heartwarming…and, dare I say, fun.

It’s good to catch up, to share my happy life, to tell folks about what I do…I’ve been told my passion and enthusiasm for writing, marketing and blogging is contagious — apparently, even on the web. My network has expanded dramatically over the last seven days…and so has my business.

Head on over my friends…post your face.

By Elizasmom

Note: I asked several of my clients, colleagues, and friends who work in fields related to design if they’d be interested writing for my blog. This is the first of a series of guest posts. Elizasmom is my good friend, chocolate winner, fantastic client, and wonderful freelance writer. I’m thrilled to be posting her thoughts. — Leslie

Hello! I am not a designer, but I was smart enough to hire LT to do the work for me, which means that I have excellent taste. Also, her expertise is rubbing off on me and the font I am using to type this up in Word right now is kerned ALL WRONG.

See: Big Designer words: I haz dem! Obviously, I am qualified to post here.

To get to the point, I thought it might be instructive to write about an experience I had with young designers at Big Nameless Institution Where I Work (henceforth: BNIWIW).

My department at BNIWIW is one that interacts with the community by presenting performances which are advertised in part by posters. We’ve come by the poster designs in a variety of ways, professional and un-, with predictably uneven results.

Several years ago, casting about for a good, low-budget way to handle this problem, I found a graphic design professor who was interested in giving his students real world experience and who agreed to incorporate into his curriculum the creation of 4 of our posters.

About 7 weeks before each event, I visited the class with members of the creative team assembling our performance. I supplied the graphic designers with information about the nuts and bolts — deadlines, text, logo information. Meanwhile, the creative team described the performance, including any helpful visual cues.

About 3 or 4 weeks later, we came back to the class, where each student presented his or her work. Then, we took all the posters back with us, spread them out on the floor and walked back and forth, gradually eliminating the weaker contenders until we had decided on the best one. To help the designers learn from the process, I sent the class an evaluation explaining why we chose the design we did and what its best points were, as well as what we liked about some of the other strong designs.

Although each performance was different, there were patterns to the process, the first being that beginning designers who were short on inspiration tended toward the alarmingly literal. If asked to illustrate, say, The Name of the Rose, they would have come back at us with a red flower wearing a “Hello, My Name Is: ___” sticker. OK, bad example — that would be funny and I would think about using that poster. But you get the idea. In my armchair psychologist’s opinion, this has to do with not yet trusting one’s creative impulses enough, or not yet knowing it well enough to trust it, perhaps.

I also have to lay the blame partly at our feet. In many cases, the creative team members were still learning, both about their craft and about how to express what they do to others outside the field — without boxing the graphic designers in. The most skillful of our creative teams elicited the most envelope-pushing entries.

There were always a few designers whose work was surer, bolder. One student, asked to illustrate a presentation whose subject matter included angels, cropped in close on a pair of feet, floating, and then added a single delicate, soft, pink feather just below them. Understated, witty, gorgeous.

Another woman listened to the presenters of that same piece and made a conceptual leap based on our descriptions of an important visual element of the performance — red cables — and a key theme — interconnectedness. Using slim, clear plastic tubing and water with red food coloring, she created an art installation that evoked variously a web, blood, an IV stand and a Jackson Pollock work, then photographed it and handed us a darkly gorgeous piece of art. Our winner.

Brilliant as that piece was, its original version illustrated another common quirk of the new designers: They tended to get so caught up in the visual elements of their design that they neglected the text, wedging it into weird little corners, making poor font choices (SAND!), and worst of all, introducing errors into the text.

To the very end of the year, I was unable to convince some of them that a poster about a performance should not have the ticket information in 12-point font.

In the case of the designer I mentioned above, she had actually heard me on the size thing, but her text was riddled with typos and was plunked over the most interesting part of the photo. There were other posters that had text with fewer errors, but this image was so right for us that we had to try and make it work.

I emailed her with our concerns and offered as guidance that she think about stacking her text into an interestingly-shaped chunk of negative space, but that we had to have a corrected poster within 48 hours or we would go to option B.

I had it on my desk, immaculately typed and perfectly arranged, in 12, and that turned out to be the third thing element I noticed during this collaboration. The best posters were always by a student who had bothered to come to class (instead of leaving it with their teacher), who had made an engaged presentation, and once her/his design was chosen, was prompt and thorough about whatever changes we wanted to make to the final piece.

It was a brilliant experience — 13 posters to choose from! What a luxury! And some of them were smashingly good. Like, write-down-her-name-because-she’ll-be-famous-in-the-industry-someday-good.