Birth of a Notion

Sometimes I struggle and strain to come up with a topic for this blog, striving to find a clever way to vent my graphic frustrations while passing along some useful tidbits of information in the most humorous way possible. Sometimes I toss and turn in my humble bed, waking the wife and annoying the cats as I mutter curses to the gods for giving me more talent than inspiration, or the other way ‘round, or neither. And then sometimes, all this shit just comes together in such an accidental but somehow perfect way that I have no choice but to get it out, write it down and blog it up.

This is one of those times.

In my last entry I did quite a bit of bitching about some design school grads and their utter lack of knowledge about the fine art of lithography. In retrospect, it may have been a bit harsh, and I was thinking maybe my next entry should be an attempt to balance the scales a bit. In spite of the prevailing paradigm of printers and designers regarding each other as cat and dog enemies, I do have quite a few designer friends, most of whom hold degrees from one respectable institution or another.

Around the time that I was writing the last entry (A Tale of Woe), I took a break to hang out with one of those designers at a local bar where she had just entered a Chili cook-off. Her name is Barb, and she’s one hell of a designer. Her stuff looks great, and I recommend her to people all the time. Babs and I have a healthy exchange of ideas; she knows way more about design than I do, and I know way more about printing, and we trade a lot of useful information. I was telling her the story that turned into my last blog, and she was rolling her eyes sympathetically at all the appropriate places, and the discussion turned toward the question “why don’t more design school people know what they need to know about printing?”

She confessed to me that she’d always thought it would be a great idea to get a pre-press job for a year or two, just to learn the ins and outs of the industry, and to get a first hand feel for what a printshops needs from a designer’s artwork. The trouble is, she’s just never been able to find a job opening like that, and when one does come up, there’s a whole bunch of people like me waiting in line to apply ahead of her. It is pretty rough out there, I agree. A lot of big companies are outsourcing their layout work, laying off design people right left and sideways. Twenty-nine other people applied for my job at the same time I did, and that was before the current recession had even begun. Babs and I agree that design students should all spend a year working pre-press in a real working print shop, the same way med students are required to do rounds in a real hospital. Unfortunately, neither of us has any idea how to make this happen. We just know that it should.

So I slink back to my apartment, full of Barb’s chili ( it was called ‘Meatsplosion’, and it was fantastic), beer, and a need to vent my frustrations. I post my grumblings to my blog, and am sort of pleasantly surprised to find that I’ve gotten a few comments from other pre-press people who seem just as frustrated as me (shout-outs to TheSlapster and geo... thanks for feeling my pain). I have a renewed sense of urgency and camaraderie, and vow to update this thing at least once a week from now on.

Then I get the e-mail. It was from one Matthew Weller who works in a print shop in Great Britain. The contents of his e-mail made me almost giddy with the possibility of a brighter future:

Hi Bob,

Just wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your blog. I’m a young designer working in a printers and I can relate to everything you write about. Particularly the ‘kid going to design school’. I’ve worked 2 years at a printers but I’m due to go to university for a design degree, I feel as a designer this will benefit my skill-range but I’m glad I’ve got 2 years experience in a printers so when I graduate I’ll already know the woes that designers can leave printers faced with! I even just recently had a young graduate designer complain to me about the poor colour on a print job (which was due to the poor conversion of HIS RGB supplied files on the apogee pre-press!).

Anyway I just wanted to let you know, again, how much I enjoy your posts and maybe convince you that there are some (if only a few) young designers out there with an interest and basic knowledge in the world of pre-press.

Best,

Mat Weller

Apple Print Limited

2Q Faraday Road

Newbury, Berkshire

RG14 2AD United Kingdom

www.appleprint.co.uk

Mat, you are indeed one of the good ones. Your future clients will benefit enormously from your knowledge of the printing process, and I pray they reward you accordingly. I mean, come on, this is exactly what Barb and I were talking about! For once, the thing that I truly believed should happen apparently was happening. Fantastic. Stellar. Cheers to everyone involved, let’s have another round.

So here’s the thing: I really think this is a great idea, and I wonder how many others out there agree with me and Mat and Barb. There must be more than just the three of us. I also wonder if there are any far-sighted design schools out there who see the importance of this. Maybe some of them even require students to spend some time in the pre-press dungeons of the world, or maybe they’ve even opened working print shops on campus where future designers can experience the educational joys of cranking out plates for a room full of grumpy pressmen. Maybe not, but I’d like to know.

I’ve always thought that talented designers were a lot like master chefs, and us pre-press grunts were a lot like line cooks, doing the real physical cooking to ensure the perfect execution of the chef/designer’s inspired vision. If that’s the case, then it’s no stretch to assume that we can all only get better at our jobs if there’s a higher level of respect and communication between designers and printers. At the end of the day we all want the same things; to make a great product that we can be proud of, and to work smarter instead of harder, so we’ll have more time to spend enjoying the other parts of our lives.

Alright people, I really want some feedback on this one... Is there a way out of this wilderness of ignorance and miscommunication? Can we make things better? You tell me!

**********************************************************

Next time around, I’m thinking maybe I’ll relate a bit of my history and share some of the sordid details that landed me in the role of “pre-press guy”. Until then, take care of yourselves, and for god’s sake, talk to each other once in a while. ;-)

PEACE!

A Tale of Woe

Okay, so I’ve been gone for a while, and I know I promised you a story about the recent design school graduate who doesn’t understand color separation, and you’ve all been very patient, but dammit people... I have a life to live! Anyway, here’s the tale of woe...

A couple of weeks back this guy comes into our shop with a laptop and tells us he’s been referred to us by another local printer who just can’t seem to work with his files. The boss and a customer service rep and I all sit down with him and he describes the job. He says it’s a two color piece, black and red; a 2-sided cover wrapped around a 4 page book, folded, stitched and inserted into an envelope. All black and red. He blazes through a lot of images on his laptop, and they do indeed look like a fairly simple 2 color job. We ask him what the trouble was with his last print shop, and he launches into a diatribe about how they kept asking him to change the files, and submit them at a ridiculously high resolution, and change the colors, etc., etc. And then he says those magic words that send a chill down the spine of every printer: “I went to design school, I know what I’m doing.”

This is where I should’ve kept asking questions, but I didn’t, because I was in the middle of outputting plates, designing some other client’s piece, and burning and labeling 300 DVD’s, all at the same time.

The boss says to him “you built all these documents in Adobe, right?”, and the kid replies in the affirmative. This is where I should’ve asked “Adobe WHAT?”, because Adobe makes a lot of software products, and some of them are just not the right place to build a document, but I didn’t. The platesetter was beeping, and I wanted to get back to it. The boss says to me “We can handle that, right? Adobe PhotoShop?” and I say “Well, we can open it, but is it a flattened file or did you save it as layers?” The kid assures me that all the layers are saved. Again, I should’ve asked “Are the black and red on DIFFERENT layers?”, but I didn’t. The hopper on the DVD duplicator was about to go empty, and I wanted to get those DVD’s burned by the end of the day.

So the kid leaves his files, the job gets written up, and I get my hands on the files the next day. Oh my god. Those files were a not-so-hot mess.

First off, there were two versions of every file... one in CMYK and one in RGB. No worries on the black; I can just ignore the RGB files (why the HELL would anyone send an RGB file to a printshop?!?), and convert all the black from the CMYK file to 100% black (C=0, M=0, Y=0, K=100). But the red? Now that’s a problem. There’s no way to make a PhotoShop document hang onto a specific Pantone number, so we have to guess at the red. Oh well; the client will have to approve a proof of the job, so we can use that opportunity to find a red that he likes. But separating the colors? Oh brother. The files were indeed in layers, as promised, but not in any way that might be useful. There were a zillion different layers, and almost every one of them included both black and red. Now I have to save two copies of each file, remove all the red from one and all the black from the other, flatten them and convert them to grayscale images, lay them over top of each other in InDesign, and then apply a specific Pantone spot color to the “red” file.

But that’s not all. These pieces are supposed to bleed off all four sides of the page, and he built them “to size”, so there’s no extra image for the bleed. So BEFORE I can separate the colors, I have to add a quarter of an inch to the canvas size in PhotoShop and fill in the extra space with the paintbrush and rubber stamp tools. This would be ridiculous enough if it were just solid color bleeding off the edges, but it’s more complicated than that. You know those curlicue/decorative-vine/Mike Tyson face tattoo embellishments everyone’s been overusing for a couple of years now? Yeah, that’s right... he used those all over the place.

I fix his bleeds, separate his colors, re-combine them in InDesign (designated as a spot red trapping to the black), and I’m still not done. It turns out there are still more of those decorative swirls that need to be applied as a varnish coat, so that part of the black has to be separated and placed on another layer in InDesign, so it will output as a separate plate that doesn’t trap to anything or knock out the black.

Basically I spent most of a day tearing this client’s artwork to pieces and rebuilding it just to get it to the point where I could start trying to plate it. He doesn’t understand how color works on a printing press. He doesn’t understand that PhotoShop is for photos and InDesign is for designing a finished piece. He doesn’t even realize that he needs to pick a pantone color if he wants a specific spot color. But don’t worry about him, he’ll be fine. He went to design school, and he knows what he’s doing. I, on the other hand, didn’t go to design school, so I have to sit in a windowless room and fix his mistakes.

I’m gonna go drink beer now and try to figure out which one of us is the idiot.

Ooh, the Colors....

I’ve spent the past two days trying to fix artwork submitted by a client, and it’s reminding me that most people, recent design school grads included, just don’t understand color and how it works on the printed page. In the hopes of throwing a little light on the subject, here are some definitions you might find useful:

CMYK

This is how most full color printing gets done. It stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. I have no idea why K equals Black, but it does. Somebody figured it all out a long time before I was born, and I’m willing to accept it. Any full color photograph you see printed in a magazine or newspaper is created by those four colors, screened at different angles, and printed in four passes onto a sheet of paper. When your printer mentions “four color process”, this is what he’s referring to. Under a magnifying glass a picture of green grass becomes a jumble of Cyan and Yellow dots; the sky is a combination of Cyan and Magenta, and the tree trunks are Yellow and Black. Maybe you should’ve gotten stoned before reading this. Most parts of any color printed image will contain varying levels of all four colors. If you’re including color photographs in your newsletter you’ll want them to be CMYK. Most image editing software, like Adobe PhotoShop, will allow you to convert any image to CMYK. If you don’t do that, the prepress guy will have to do it for you, and you just might get charged for it. This is especially handy to know these days, because you probably took those pictures with a digital camera, and they save all your files in RGB.

Wait for it... wait for it...

RGB

Red, Green and Blue. This is how color images are created on TV and the internet, and video games, and your cell phone, and... well, hell, everywhere but the printed page. In all those mediums, images are created with light instead of ink. Red and Blue make Purple, Green and Blue make Aqua, and Green and Red make... well, a really disgusting shade, sort of like dirty moss. Maybe you should’ve dropped some extasy before reading this. Anyway, the point here is, RGB looks great on a backlit screen, but it confuses the hell out of printing equipment which is all calibrated to lay CMYK down onto the paper.

Ink vs. Light

Here’s an interesting side note that may help you remember some of this... If you want to create white with light, you use all the colors in the visible spectrum. If you want to create black with light, you just turn the damn light off. If you want to make white with ink, don’t do anything. The paper is already white. If you want to print the darkest black possible, use all the colors. To put it another way, in CMYK, more is darker and less is lighter. In RGB it’s just the opposite.

Spot Colors

These are still combinations of CMYK, but they’re pre-mixed like house paint to match a numbered Pantone swatchbook.* If you’re having letterhead printed and your logo is green, spot colors will save you a bundle. In CMYK it would take 2 plates to create that green, but if you choose a spot color, the printer will mix that exact color and apply it to the paper in one pass, using only one plate. The other bonus is that your chosen shade of green has a Pantone number, and it can be matched by any printer on the planet who has a swatchbook. And, much like drinking problems, all pressmen have Pantone swatchbooks.

On the other hand, if you’re printing a piece with CMYK photographs, and your green logo appears on the same page, insisting on a spot color will add a plate to your press run. In that case, it’s best to let your logo be converted to CMYK so it can run in four passes with the rest of the job.

I know, I know, this is a lot of information to keep straight if you’re not in the graphics biz, but knowing a little about color and how it’s used to create your print materials will save you and your printer some time and frustration.

Next time around, maybe I’ll relate the story of my last two days at work, and how understanding color would have made all the difference. Maybe you should get drunk before you read it.

* That thing I’m peaking through in my profile pic? That’s a Pantone Swatch book.