Ed #10 Prepress

Your talks with the printer shouldn’t stop at the specifications. You should also discuss how you’ll be supplying material to make sure the printer’s systems can handle it. And you should be asking questions, too. Do any elements of the proposed design present any potential problems? Talk about the look you’re after—the printer may have suggestions on how to achieve it. He or she also might be able to provide samples of similar projects. You should also ask for a paper dummy—or dummies—to get an idea of what the job will feel like or to compare different stocks.

Armed with the information you’ve supplied, the printer’s representative will begin to work on an estimate and schedule the job. Typically, working with others in the shop, he or she can determine what equipment, web or sheetfed, will be used to produce the job and how it will be printed. If you’re printing a job that features lots of textiles, for example, the printer may recommend stochastic, or FM screening, since FM screens help reduce the risk of moirés. If the run contains personalized information, the printer may recommend digital presses.

While there have never been more tools to produce your vision in print, the roles of the people involved are less well-defined than in the past, so you may need to consider who does what. If you provide the printer with scans of art or illustrations, you may save money, but you also will be responsible for any problems that arise—or for paying to fix them. The same goes for color correction and retouching—will it be performed by you, the photographer or the printer? Don’t forget proofreading, either. The lack of adequate proofreading is the most common cause of budget-busting alterations and costly reprints.

The estimate should also include a timeline, indicating when the printer needs materials and approvals from you in order to complete the project on time, without overtime charges. Then you can incorporate those dates into the master schedule, which lists all of the deadlines needed to complete the project, including those for client comments and approvals.

While you’ve been working on all of that, you’ve also been developing the design. That usually means working with a variety of software programs, from word processing programs that create documents to image manipulation programs, such as Photoshop®, that allow for the manipulation of type, color and images. The elements created by those programs are brought together in page layout programs that assemble them for printing.