You give it to the printer and the printer does magic...

That was what it felt like, and what the instructors' answers boiled down to, when I was taking a graphic design class back in high school and asking how the designs we made, the original artwork and mock-ups, these pieces of acetate and blue-pencil scribbles, all got turned into the final printed pieces -- which only sometimes came out looking like what they were supposed to! I wanted to understand, but I found that most of the people who were supposed to be teaching me this stuff didn't actually know what the actual processes were, and so I had to learn it the hard way, over the course of years, by (often expensive) trial-and-error (lots of error) and eventually, going "backstage" and becoming one of the people who did that magic -- or who answered the questions of designers to the best of my ability, to help them avoid setting things up wrong.

It wasn't long before I was struck with the idea of writing a book that would have all of the things that I most frequently had to explain to customers or colleagues, and only the things you needed to know to get your print jobs out -- because after struggling through the seriously arcane, often poorly-explained minutae of (for example) color separation in technical manuals and articles written by people who didn't know how to explain them to neophytes (aka n00bs) like me, I often not only had no idea what I was supposed to do to get an image to print out properly, but was completely terrified of screwing up and didn't dare experiment - and yet, it would often turn out that the issue wasn't that complicated, at least not so far as it took to accomplish the task at hand. It seemed like there had to be a way to boil these things down into a digestible form, so to speak.

The problem with writing a book is that it takes too long and by the time one has finished researching one thing, the technology may have changed or one may have learned a better method...and then there's the whole problem of finding a publisher willing to gamble on such a project, and I never had the time or resources to try to do this properly and systematically - the more I struggled to knock it into shape, the more tangled it all seemed to become.

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I shouldn't need to tell anybody this...

but I do, since it's happened more times than I can number now.

It doesn't just apply to printing, of course, but I haven't had it happen anywhere but in copy shops; people in bookstores seem to be a little more focused on completing their transactions and getting home with their loot, in my experience, and I don't have any behind-the-counter experience of other forms of retail or CS.

I am referring, of course, to the habit of walking in, beginning an interaction with the person behind the counter - and then taking a phone call and proceeding to make the person at the counter wait, for an indefinite period, while the customer yatters away with complete disregard for the timewasting they are inflicting on the customer service rep, who is placed in the bind of having to either stand there awkwardly like a statue or deactivated robot for the indefinite duration, unable to get on with their own work and conscious of deadlines, or of giving up on - and potentially insulting - the client who continues to do their business in public, without regard for courtesy or inconvenience to others.

Triple-word-score points if they do this repeatedly in the course of trying to place an order.

And it's never been something excusable, like family emergencies - it's always been people who just can't put off an entirely off-puttable reply to another sales rep, frex, for the whole six minutes max it would take to pick out a paper color and decide on a quantity and get their order running. "Easily Distracted" is not even close.

I myself have been known to tell the egregious that they 'will probably get better reception outside' (hint, hint, HINT) and to say outright to the repeat-offending that I have work to do and when they're ready to get down to brass tacks, to ring the counter bell - but then, pure cast iron and nothing but, these days: I don't see any point (for me OR my employers) in wasting on-the-clock time and the limited number of hours to accomplish already-engaged customers' tasks before deadline, to cater to the vanity of someone who can't be bothered to pay full attention to their own projects, and is only going to spend $5 on copies for all the waiting (and haggle about it, most likely!)

Seriously, folks, if you can't finish one five-minute task without haring off halfway through on another, then you're not a good high-powered business manager, you're someone who needs to learn how to focus and organize. And to have a little respect for the people you interact with professionally, no less.

(And no, this isn't the fault of cell phones. I've seen the same jackholes engage in the same obnoxious behavior when they run into a RL acquaintance happening to stop in to the shop at the same time: nothing wrong with making some clerk-lackey stand there for ten minutes while you trade details of your swimming-pool cleaning project and the great seats you got for your season tickets at Fenway and what a hard time you're having getting good help for your minimum-wage-paying business... Technology does not make the jerk, technology simply facilitates jerkish behavior)

Don't build your files in points/pica - please!

Several times I have gotten Quark or Pagemaker or InDesign files where the measurements were set up to be something that was not inches. Every time I - or any prepress tech that I know - gets one of these, we almost always immediately change the rulers to inches. This is because if you have to do anything beyond the tiniest of type changes, a non-inches setup will quickly go from a mere annoyance to a real hazard.

It's not the "right way" of doing it, and you will not seem more "professional" if you do it.

(Yes, I really had to convince a designer of this. They had read about it in books, you see.)

Nobody uses a points/pica measuring system when outputting files. I've never encountered anyone who thinks in seventy-seconds, and the fact that way back when it used to be the industry standard doesn't mean a thing any more (and hasn't for decades, either.) It's like going to England and trying to pay by the old monetary system - you wouldn't convert to shillings and sixpence, so don't change your measurements back to what was used in printing in 1971, either.

And if you're still using it because that's what you were taught? Time to get with the program, if you're using programs instead of pasteup!

Resolved: To Use Appropriate Resolution

Bigger is always better, right? Higher resolution is always better than lower, isn't it?

--If only it were that easy...

I hesitated over doing this entry, because too often (almost always, in fact) too low of a resolution is the problem with customer-supplied images, but since oversized graphics can bog down or choke a network to the point of missing deadlines, even in these days of standard DSL and cable modems, it's a problem that has to be addressed, no matter how fraught.

Generally speaking, people tend to provide files that are far too low - 72dpi, or 96, or yes 300 but they want it blown up to the size of a poster, and the original may be 300dpi...at 2" x 2"--! So as a general rule, yes, we want your pictures as hi-res as possible, since this is often the only way to avoid getting a 72dpi mess that won't print out at all well. (And yes, often lo-res graphics look better on low-end home-office inkjets. It's an Arcane Mystery - well, actually, it's more like a low-light situation camouflaging a poor paint job: the jagged edges of the 72dpi image are blurred by the cheap printheads and the lack of detail that the inexpensive inkjet is capable of, in this case turns out to be a feature rather than a bug. In the harsh light of the crisp output of the higher-quality machines, all the jags will be rendered with painful exactness.) Overall, you're going to be better off giving the larger image file, almost every time.

However, in the "little learning is a dangerous thing" division, you also not infrequently get desgners who go overboard in the other direction - they don't want to have their work come out low quality, so they create files that are way overkill and, because they are so massively too large for what is needed, that they not only don't look any better than they would if they were even half the size, but sometimes can actually look worse. I've seen it happen

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Don't use terms you don't understand

You know how in comedies, there will be this scene where somebody tries to bluff their way through without actually knowing anything about the topic of their posing, and the humor lies in how preposterously inappropriate their dialogue is, and how far out they can push the charade before someone bursts their bubble? 

That's what it feels like, when somebody calls up a print shop and demands "matte gloss 20-pound cover" as yes, really did happen to me, or says "It's a vector GIF," in answer to the question "Is the logo a vector or a bitmap image?" or otherwise misuses terminology which really does have specific meaning, in an attempt to sound more competent than they really are.

The effect is always, always the opposite.

If you don't understand a technical term that the printers are using, ask.

If you have a half-baked recollection of a technical term from some old graphics class or overhearing a designer talking, don't toss it out. You will only confuse the prepress people, and you may get something totally different from what you really want, but because you insisted (so very definitely, too) on (frex) "coated matte-finish" when what you really wanted was uncoated paper, your customer service people might not be able to figure out what it is you actually needed!

After all, if you wouldn't go in and toss around half-remembered names of the bones of the human skeleton at the clinic in order to try to impress your physician when asking for assistance, why would you do it with any other trained professional?