Posted by: Catherine Morley
Category: Designers Working With
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After you finish a project, do you ask your clients to tell you the good AND bad about your performance? Or do you slink away, not wanting to know? I don’t know about you, but I learn a great deal when it comes to the negative. I mean, think about it, you can’t improve on the positive, right?

It’s the same with vendors, the professionals you work with, which is why the question below has been added to the series.

“When working with designers, what do you see as the top problem areas?”

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Alex

A major problem designers seem to have is knowing what color space to design in eg. CMYK or RGB. It’s astonishing to know that so many still can’t handle those simple tasks. I spend a lot of time fixing files that contain RGB color profiles that will cause incorrect coloring on press.

Another problem encountered many times is the process of embedding fonts into a printable PDF file. Many designers are not familiar with the importance of this process and how it helps to not only speed the time needed to print the job but also the accuracy maintained between initial submission and final output. Nothing peeves a designer more than to see their project come back looking unlike how they had it on the design table.

Which brings me to my next prepress woe, Transparency, Overprint settings, and Cross-overs. A great many designers create projects unaware of how they are actually plated at the printer. A designer needs to check objects for overprinting settings where necessary (white text over a solid color would be knock-out, black text over any color but black is set to overprint). They need to make sure these settings go with the printable files they send. Cross-overs are rarely adjusted correctly, all a designer needs to do is contact the printer and ask for the necessary measurements required for binding in order to adjust files accordingly.

Designers also need to be aware that transparency on screen rarely looks the same as on press and they need to beware what colors are being blended together in those transparent elements. We are dealing with ink blots, not pixels or drawings.

Alex Noguera | Prepress Operator
www.bowne.com

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Brad

Files - it seems sometimes designers give us files they know don’t work and just expect us to fix them. We don’t deal with high end materials here, so we’re having to convert from RGB to CMYK, fonts are missing, links are missing, bleeds not pulled….the list is long, and this is basic stuff.

There are designers that seem to not understand the basic printing process (how many times do we tell them how to pull the bleeds and why they have to do that, or, no….ink actually has to dry first before we fold it down to a triangle)

Unrealistic timelines - we have designers that have spent 2 and 3 months designing something and expect us to turn around a job that takes 7 working days into 2. (you’ve just spent 2 months on a project you forgot actually had to get printed??)

Brad McAuley | Printer
Kwik Kopy | Canada

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Chris

Because my business is so new (less than a year), we have yet to see a lot of “designers” contact us for their work. So my personal experience interacting with designers is minimal at best, but I can say that working with other printers before I opened the business has given me some insight into prepress. That element of design seems to be an after thought at times, when in reality, it’s just as important as the concept and design itself. So I would put prepress at the top of the list for problem areas. Understand color separations and their importance. Converting text to paths is a very common request amongst printers (no matter the process/project).

Color is not always king. It’s all too easy nowadays to open a computer program, put some gradients and drop shadow on an object or text and it looks “cool”. When in reality, the WYSIWYG effect does not apply. Your monitor is not a piece of paper and a printer will not reproduce the elements you see on your screen. So when you apply that 3-4 color gradient to an object, you must understand that the result will not be the same when printed - offset or digital.

Chris Tomlinson | Owner: Gonink - Design & Print
Gonink - Design & Print | A Designer’s Journey | USA

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Derald

The main problems are:

1. Images: Missing, low resolution, wrong color mode, embedded in document
2. Fonts: Missing or corrupt
3. Not supplying a color mock-up
4. No bleed edges on images or documents

*****Not calling to discuss questions they have before they build the project.

Derald Schultz | Atlanta Graphic Design + Web Design + Printing
Mediarail Design, Inc. | USA

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Elisabetta

I covered some in question one, but mainly there are problems with PDFs (like fonts not properly embedded), use of low res images, bleeds not set up properly. Some designers don’t know how to work with spot colours.

Printers are wary of InDesign, especially where I am (Italy). They should be wary of InDesign users. As QuarkXPress came before, InDesign users, unless they have started designing after InDesign came out, don’t know how to deal with transparency. It’s because QuarkXPress didn’t have support for transparency until the recent version 7. If people can deal with transparency correctly they won’t have problems when InDesign docs/PDFs go on press.

On a sidenote, designers should check if printers have frequent problems with fonts in PDFs made by InDesign. If they have, they probably don’t have the RIP that can handle InDesign’s font conversion and they’ll ask designers to save to PostScript and then use Acrobat Distiller to make PDFs instead of using the PDF export in InDesign. Some printers don’t even know why they have that problem, but it’s all in the PostScript version of their RIP. Having a level 3 RIP isn’t enough, they have to have a certain version of their level 3 RIP. Providing fonts aren’t faulty in the first place of course.

Elisabetta Bruno | Graphic Designer / Prepress

ThinkCreation | Forum host and contributor of
About Desktop Publishing and About Graphics Software | Italy

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Genie

Colours not set up correctly. Something set up with no gutters when the job bleeds and requires gutters. No trim marks or bleed. Set up at a random number up when I require a different number for printing.

Genie Ho | Prepress and design
PDQ Print | New Zealand

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George

Usually its the dpi. Sometimes we get pictures they downloaded from the Internet and we cannot usually use these files. Also, program compatibility. Most people use Adobe programs. Corel Draw is used seldomly. Any special fonts should be included.

George Lee | Printer
Nan Sing Printing | Thailand

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HotGloss Printing

RGB… We print 4-color process. We require files in CMYK mode. Yet, there are so many people designing for the web, that don’t understand the color shift that is likely to occur if they design in RGB and convert to CMYK.

Regardless of who you print through, I always suggest finding out if the printer has any issues regarding equipment limitations. All equipment is different, and certain printers have problems doing certain jobs. Some colors may not print well, large areas of solids, thin knockout text, etc.

HotGloss Printing | USA

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John

Overconfidence. It’s hard for me to elaborate, but designers should feel responsible for how things are produced, and make it easy for the printers to do a good job. Print shops can have a habit of complaining to clients about files and designers point the blame right back. It’s wrong to put the client through this when they have no knowledge of the industry. Designers need to think more like printers.

John Carvalho | Owner/Graphic Designer
Mixed Media: Design & Printing Services | USA

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Lyn

If printer is provided with files in the native application:

a. Problems with graphics

• missing or unlinked
• not converted to CMYK (or spots)
• resolution too low
• resolution too high (resized down within layout)
• cropped by more than ~10% in the layout program (should be resized to 100% in Photoshop then replaced in layout)
• inappropriate formats (e.g. WMF, GIF)
• copied/pasted instead of placing
• embedded rather than linked
• unflattened layers

b. Problems with text

• fonts not supplied
• application of formatting attributes such as bolding, italics via a formatting menu rather than using an installed font variation
• fonts in EPS files not outlined/converted to curves
• mixing fonts with same names but different formats (e.g. Type 1 and Truetype) or variations of similar but different fonts (e.g. Times and Times New Roman)

c. Problems with layout

• forgetting to check spots are converted to CMYK if only process colours to be used in printing
• inconsistency of spot colour names between placed graphics and layout palette colours
• leaving material out on pasteboard
• forgetting to remove unused styles and colours
• forgetting to remove unused layers
• inadequate bleeds
• izing, cropping and rotating of graphics should be done in art program not layout

If printer is provided with files in PDF format:

• use of incorrect settings resulting in low resolution graphics and unembedded fonts
• forgetting to allow for bleeds (not present in most pre-sets)
• creating a PDF version higher than printer’s equipment can handle

Lyn Eggleston | Australia

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Matt

Lack of pre-press skills and not researching what machine/method it will be output on. I don’t know how many times I’ve had a designer bring me a file I just can’t print or have finished properly. A successful design must be planned around the machines that will produce it or else it falls short or fails completely. Someone told me once “printing is the most screw-up-able trade in existence”. After 6 years of printing, I believe it. There are so many variables to having a successful print job, the responsibility is shared by both the creator and the producer. The more you know, and better prepared you (and your files) are, the greater your success of having a printing job you’ll be proud of.

Matt Beazley | Printer
www.eyemean.com | Canada

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PrintDriver

The top problem areas with designers in this field is not calling before doing file prep to get specs. Color in wide format is not at all like separation printing and requires knowing what swatch books to use (and what ones NOT to use. ie NEVER use the Pantone Bridge or Solid-to-Process guide). An inordinate amount of bleed is needed for some processes, sometimes up to a foot all around on very large pieces, with at least 1/4″ to 1/2″ being standard.

Bleed, crop marks, not knowing various material and substrate size restrictions, and image resolution that doesn’t hold up at the large output sizes are the major stumbling blocks. The other problem is, believe it or not, too much resolution. Too much slows your redraw time and chokes our rips. Ask for optimum resolution (usually given in a printer spec).

PrintDriver | Print Consultant | USA

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Tom

Lack of knowledge about finished product production techniques seems to be the biggest stumbling block. Second is the proper use of color spaces for the appropriate media. For example, submitting a raster file in the RGB color space will not work for a job requiring spot separations (DeviceN color space).

Tom Stege | Lead Prepress Operator - Seattle Location
Print Time Online | USA

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Next Wednesday we’ll get to “How Printers / Prepress Specialists Work: The Process”.

until the next
Designers WW,
cat