Design Certification?

Where are you located. I do know of two prep operators that are looking for a position.

I have been a prepress manager for 15+ years and to get the same or more money I think I would need to find a different position. Right now I am down to 5 direct reports because of the virus but we usually have 10.

I know how the older strippers felt when film was being replaced with direct to plate. I see the things that are happening with inkjet and the rest of the digital presses and think it is a matter of time before the click charges are cheap enough and any of the 40" press runs will be the niche.

I think even at my age I just need to find something that may be harder but different. When I got started out of school stripping on a table was at the end of life or at least on its way. We were trained how to do it but I ran offset presses for the first 13 years and then got sick of hearing excuses about why we couldn’t get traps correct and the internet wasn’t full of info. I started by going into prep on my own time and did the book tutorials for quark express and started correcting the traps and the messing with dot gains and the film we were getting was amazingly better. I got a full time job as a prep operator for a much larger company and went through the first two years of film going away and straight to direct to plate.

New England area. Remember I said Wide Format though.

I started as a stat camera operator that lasted all of about 2 months before having to dive head first into Quark, Illustrator and Photoshop for a design job. Got tired of that side real quick and landed a pre-press job in the fast moving wide-format industry. Luckily I’d had exposure to Illustrator in college and learned enough about Quark in college to TA the print lab there.There was no real internet back then LOL. We were all learning it ground up. And I had a most excellent mentor who could make a Lambda printer do headstands and like it.

I started off as a photo-typesetter and a – ahem – male stripper. To this day I still cannot understand “bleed” not being in designers’ vocabulary.

Bleed is specific to the print industry, and I think most artists design primarily for internet and electronic delivery. Or they are in a niche where it’s irrelevant like logos or illustration. Then they get tapped to do a printed piece, and the technical issues of print are all alien concepts.

Yep, yep, yep. Exactly my experience. The best printers for postcards, flyers, brochures, etc, will provide instructions on file set up, and have templates of ID, PS and AI. The best ones for magazines and catalogs will supply a Distiller file with their preferred output settings, and provide detailed instructional PDFs that cover all technical issues, including how they’d like the files named and numbered. Always an absolute pleasure working with these printers.

Then there’s the other printers… no templates, no instructions… customer service rep doesn’t know what the bleed should be so he tells you to do whatever you want and they’ll fix it. “We’ll fix it, we fix everything. We’ve got software that will take care of everything for you.” So, I’m not surprised people don’t know how to set things up properly. The printing industry invites that on themselves when they say things like that. They’ve trained people to not care about set up.

I worked on a high-end coffee table hard-bound photo book a few years ago. The publishing company/printer send me a preconfigured Mac and display to use along with the instructions not to change any of the settings. I needed to send it back with I was done with the project, of course. I’ve never heard of this level of pickiness and attention to detail from any printer before or after, but it was great. They did a fantastic job printing and binding the book, by the way.

I’m not giving internet artists a pass at not knowing what bleed is. It’s right there in the spec sheet if they read it. If they don’t know what it is, they got the whole internet right in front of them to ask. Or maybe they should recognize their limitations. Nope. Not an excuse.

As for printers not supplying templates. We do. But only on off-the-shelf stuff which accounts for about 2% of the work I do. Everything else is custom. If you are doing a 40’ x 16’ backdrop for a stage show and you don’t know what you are doing, call first. If I ask you questions you don’t know the answers to, write them down and get the answers. For instance the first question I’m gonna ask is “How are you hanging this thing?” because that will determine your bleeds and safeties and both will be measured in inches. How many inches? Well how are you hanging this thing?

I don’t work with printers that don’t know the answers to my questions. I don’t work with printers who are afraid to call and ask me questions. I don’t mind working with new sales reps or new CSRs if they say they have to check and get back to me, and do. I recognize when they are bullshitting me or blowing me off though. Doesn’t happen too much any more as I better vet my sources now. I do work with printers that will “fix” the color profiles appropriately for their machines and the media selected for the project. I don’t expect them to “fix” my files beyond the occasional mistake. Mistakes do happen. To all of us.

But yeah, I have 20+ years of doing this. And as B pointed out in a long ago thread here on pretty much the same subject, the people I outsource work with are on a more peer-to-peer level with me than they would be with a kid fresh out of design school thinking they can freelance on graduation.

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