The past 30 years has seen a drastic shift in technology and print production. The advent of desktop publishing gave designers an unprecedented amount of control over what their finished product would look like.
I am a relative youngster in the print industry. I was not yet four years old when my father brought home a brand spanking new Macintosh 128k. It was love at first sight. Today though, I talk to my colleagues who did paste-ups and phototypesetting, and still remember the day that this mysterious beige box with an apple on it appeared in the office.
I, like many of you, attended design school. Here I learned many wondrous things about what makes good design, how typography works, the psychology of advertising and the process of creating campaigns. My teachers, like my current colleagues, started their careers in the pre-Mac era. They still put a strong emphasis on thumbnail sketches and painstakingly hand-drawn mock-ups. This was the new millennium, but we had to put in many hours on a project before being allowed to do anything on the computer. I understand their reasoning. As much as I hated thumbnail sketches, you cannot dispute the value of exploring as many different avenues of creativity as possible in the smallest commitment of time. They did not want us to use the computer as a crutch, or commit to an idea just because we had time invested in it. That being said, I always felt that my professors had a secret disdain for the computer, as well as a mindset that we the students were some how less as designers because the computer did more of the work. Maybe it was just one of those "uphill both ways in the snow" type things though. That being said, even they could not dispute that computers were here to stay, and were an essential tool for us to learn how to use.
There is an inherent problem with the way we formally train designers. Printing, especially color printing is still relatively expensive. This is especially true if you only want to print very small quantities. The industry as a whole is aimed at mass production. Therefore, when preparing for a critique, students generally rely on desktop printers in their program's lab, spray mount and the liberal use of an exacto knife. This is all well and good for getting their ideas across to the class, but does very little to prepare them for a professional pre-press situation. Not enough attention is given to preparing students for working with a printer.
As a designer and digital production manager at a printer I dread the last few weeks of each semester. Inevitably we will have unpredictable droves of students coming in to have portfolio work printed. You can always spot them as they look like they have not slept in days, and have a manic twitchiness to them from too much caffeine. As I spy them coming through the door, I always cringe internally, and silently kiss the next few hours of my day goodbye. They are always trying to get something printed for a critique that takes place in hours, and their files are invariably missing things like crops and bleeds. I once had a student ask me if he could get something printed and perfect bound in fifteen minutes while he waited. Another time I had a group of five students from the same class come in an hour before a critique. They all had different projects that needed different paper stocks, sizes and bindings. Needless to say I was considering creative methods of suicide within moments.
As a former design student I am inclined to be sympathetic to what I know is a insanely stressful, time consuming and hectically paced schedule. The average student has at least three studio classes at any given time, and they all have projects that come due at the same time. Be that as it may, there is a limit to what you can expect from your printer at the drop of a hat. Professional printers (I'm not talking about places like Kinko's) usually run on tight production schedules. They are juggling multiple large jobs worth thousands of dollars in revenue all in various stages of production. Imagine asking someone to halt a $3,000 dollar run so they can spend an hour changing papers and setups to run a 20 page project worth $30. They are going to struggle not to laugh at you. You can generally expect a 24-48 hour turnaround at most reputable printers. If they are having a slow day, or it is a very good customer, faster production times are possible, but they may charge extra for a rush job. As a production manager, I can tell you not much is more frustrating that getting your machines all set for a run (especially a tiny rush job) only to discover that the designer's "print-ready" files are not so print-ready after all.
I've often commented to my colleagues that if there was one piece of knowledge that I could magically instill in all designers and design students, it would be what crops and bleeds are, and why you need them. That was the inspiration for this blog. When I first stuck a toe in the big kid pool of professional design, I was totally unprepared for the sheer amount of things that I still did not know. My hope is that the hard earned experience contained in this blog will benefit those trying to make their mark on the design world, and maybe spare you some of the bewilderment that I felt when I got dumped headfirst into the vast sea of print design. (and maybe spare a few cranky old pressmen a coronary)
