That evening, I receive an e-mail for Apple. It was a survey about how my recent experience was. I filled it out and express my slight disappointment in the salesperson. A few days later, I received a phone call from the store manager to talk about the situation. It really made me feel like they wanted to keep my business.

Well, as luck would have it, I ended up returning the monitor because my old one wasn’t really dead. The video card was the issue, not the monitor. The Apple store waved the restocking fee. It was great. They restored any doubt I may have had about their commitment to their customer.

So what did I learn for the experience? I learned that I need to be more like the Apple store and pay more attention to my customers needs and be more responsive to them.

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

After you approved the proof, the make-ready process started. Printing plates were burned from your file and mounted on the press.

The correct ink and paper was loaded onto the press. The press was adjusted to assure the correct ink density and register. At this point, they probably called you and said, “We’re on press, come on down.”

When you arrive you are greeted by your customer service representative and are lead out to the noisy press floor. There, the pressman has already printed out the first few sheets of your press run. You are shown one, and you need to examine it for quality.

Now is not the time to be making type changes. Only make changes that can be accomplished by adjusting the press such as ink densities or color consistency. If you are lucky all other changes would have been caught before this point. If you aren’t, it’s a very expensive proposition to stop the press. Typically, idle press time is charged at $400 to $800 per hour.
These are the things that you should be looking for:

• Is the type sharp? Use a magnifying loop to check for broken or doubled lines caused by slurring or stretched paper.
• Look for color consistence from on side of the sheet to the other.
• Is the color correct? Compare it to the prepress proof.
• Is it being printed on the correct paper stock?
• Are the crossovers correct and the pages in the right order?
• If you are printing a spot color, is it correct?
• Are all graphic elements in place?
• Look for hickies and other blemishes.
• Is everything in register?

Always, remember to take a couple of press sheets with you for your files.

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

As you get close the completion of your project it’s important to print out your project and mock it up to check for color quality and content, plus technical factors.
What to look for on your color mock-up:

• Check that the colors are consistent throughout all pages.
• Check memory colors. Colors that are expected to look a certain way such as skin, sky or grass.
• Check color selected from color-matching systems against printed swatches.
• Make sure that bleeds and crossovers extend at least 1/8 inches beyond the page margins.

What to look for on a prepress proof:

• Digitally printed prepress proofs usually have no halftone dots. Ink-jet proofs should be checked for color quality and overall appearance.
• Look for missing copy elements, overprinting and the quality of the black ink compared to the other inks it overprints.
• Check images to make sure that they are still in the correct position.
• Look for overall color shift. This could be an indication of a calibration problem with your monitor.
• Scan your copy for hyphenation errors and weird line breaks. Also keep an eye out for double spaces in your document.
• Check all addresses and phone numbers for the last time.
• Make sure that all pages and page numbers are in the correct order.

If possible it’s always good to check your color proof in a light booth with ISO-standard 5,000 Kelvin lighting.

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Sometimes I find that the more limited I am in scope, the more creative I become. I remember when I was first starting out as a designer.

Sometimes I was so overwhelmed by the possibilities that it was hard for me to narrow down the elements that I wanted to use, and it took me longer to find a solution.

Graphic designers work with type day in and day out. Sometimes I think we stop seeing the beauty in its forms. Type carries with it style and personality. Not only do I want you to explore a type-only solution with type as a headline solution, I want you to actually create an image out of the letters in the type as well.

Here are a few great examples of this kind of solution:

So now it’s time for you to step out of your type box and get creative with type as image.

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Digital images contain a certain number of pixels. The dimensions at which it will be printed define its resolution. Photoshop allows you to resize photos.

Resampling happens when you change the number of pixels in a digital image, changing the file’s resolution and, of course, its reproduction size. When an image is scaled, interpolation is used to create the color levels for the pixels in the new file.

To help an image go through the prepress process more efficiently sometimes an image is subsampled, which is done by reducing the resolution.

Keep the following things in mind when scaling and resampling digital images:

1. Always try to scan an image at the actual size that it will be used to avoid having to resample or resize it later.
2. You can increase the resolution of an image by fitting it in a smaller space.
3. It’s best when subsampling to divide the original resolution by a whole number factor. For instance, if your original image is 600 ppi, resample to make the new resolution a simple faction of 600 ppi such as 300, 150 or 75 ppi.
4. Photoshop’s image size palette allows you to increase an image’s resolution. Play around and try different solutions to see what works best. Some experts say it’s best to interpolate images to higher resolutions by even factors such as doubling the size, for example. Others feel that it’s best to take several baby steps up in size such as enlarging it by 20 percent four times.
5. The unsharp mask filter in Photoshop can improve blurring created by resampling.
6. Remember, once you have resampled an image, the original information can’t be recovered, except by stepping back in the history palette, provided that you haven’t saved over the original.

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

This is a story that I like to tell my first year students. It illustrates the importance of seemingly unimportant activities and how they can help you later in your career.

I had landed my dream job at a downtown ad agency. I had only been out of school four years and looking back, I was still pretty green. I hadn’t worked there long when I was assigned a pro bono project for the Arthritis Foundation. Of course, pro bono mean basically no budget. So, working along those lines the writer and I came up with the concept that centered around the image of a witch doctor wearing a mask with a smiley face on it. I hand created the mask myself, borrowed a grass skirt from a co-worker and found a male model willing to donate his time. I lined up the photo studio, set the date and assumed that they would have something in their collection of backdrops that would work for the photo shoot.

The day of the photo shoot came. I got there early to select the backdrop and get everything set. As we went through the background options I quickly realized that there was nothing there that was going to work. There wasn’t time or money to create anything elaborate. What the heck was I going to do?

As I searched my mental archive for common materials the might work I remembered a seemingly useless project that I’d done in collage. The assignment was to take 10 4-inch by 4-inch pieces of paper and crumple them in interesting ways. I remember thinking at the time, “You have got to be kidding, how am I ever going to use this in the real world?”

Well I’ll be darned if I didn’t actually use that experience to pull my behind out of the fire. The photo studio had big rolls of brown paper that they lay on the floor to walk on after they painted the sets. My solution was to tear off big sections of paper, crumple them, smooth them out and hang them behind the witch doctor as a back drop. It worked great, see for yourself.

It looks like he’s in a cave.

It is said that we learn more from our mistakes then from our triumphs. I learned several lessons that day. First, don’t assume anything. Assuming they had a backdrop, big no no. Second, never pass up and opportunity to explore different materials in ways you normally wouldn’t. You never know when they might come in handy. And third, always do pro bono work, especially when it involves a male model in a grass skirt.

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.