Chapter 1: Life Cycle of a Printing Job

Chapter 1:

Yesterday to Today:

Due to the innovations of technology, Graphic Designers today find themselves doing more diverse work than they would have 25 years ago. For instance, Adobe Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop have replaced the way designers put a project together; back then, finalizing consisted of film and multiple proofs (page, color key, matchprint, and Cromalin) before even being sent to the printer! With all the manual labor and different departments of profession that ONE job had to go through turned to be very costly on time. The Figure below shows how the job would be divided by individual handlers for each specialty of ONE project.

McCue, 3

Within the late 1980’s the Apple Desktop Units were put on the market revolutionizing the world. This tool would continue to grow and help the graphic designing process combine multiple professional departments, decreasing the amount of places and stops ONE project would go, to conclude a faster pace of the entire process from start to finish. While technology has accelerated the time in which a job is processed, it has also brought along new opportunities like different finishes to a job like stitching, folding, binding, and die cutting, which is cutting unique shapes into a printed piece with a specially designed piece of metal. The overlapping of skills and responsibilities continues to grow due to technology’s expansion and innovation, jobs like Film Stripper, Dot Etcher, and Type Setter became obsolete from Laser Printers, Scanners, Page Layout Applications, Photoshop, and the Internet.



Created in Microsoft Word



Notable Employees in a Graphic Designing Job:

Each person part of a design job is important to the movement of the projects progress to the finish. We all know that the Designer is a huge part of an assignment, but here are just some more titles essential for a graphic design to be completed.

•Sales Rep/Customer Service: This side of the job tends to be the most involved with the customer by setting up the job, giving a price and time estimate, and answer any concerns or questions the customer might have. The Customer Service Representative works hand-in-hand with the developers of the job and customer, translating any information between the two properly and effectively to ensure a successful job.

•Estimator: The estimator may not be as personal, as they tend to be on the numerical side of the job, crunching numbers to find a price and timeframe at which the customer’s job will be completed. Estimating may seem easy but the Estimators have to take into consideration the costs such as direct and indirect supplies, overhead, manufacturing costs, variable and fixed costs, labor costs, etc. And that is just to compute the price, they also have to come up with a schedule including deadlines and how long the job takes to ship.

•Preflight Technician: This job is very important in ensuring that the job is done correctly with no problems that can be costly to either the customer or the vendor. Preflight technicians can either use a software such as FlightCheck Professional from Markzware or manually check the system themselves depending on the equipment available to them. Along with spell checking and seeing if the document contains the correct bleeds, margins, page size and correct colors, these technicians usually will organize the job so the process will run more smoothly. Preflight may even be in charge of imposition, which is positioning a file’s various pages in the right place before it is sent to print, but sometimes the prepress operator is in charge of taking this task, depending on the company pursuing the job.

•Prepress Operator: The prepress operator is one of the last people to see and edit the job before it is printed. The operator is in charge of relaying the baton from digital to print in the fastest and most efficient way necessary. This includes checking not only the project on file, but the printer as well; setting up the correct Pantone or CMYK colors along with running the correct type of paper, paper size, and thickness. Prepress is also in charge of RIPing the file or Raster Image Processing. RIP simply means to analyze the digital file, (whether it be a Postscript file or a PDF), and modify the information into a bitmap that is then readable by the output device (printer, film, or plates). Trapping may also occur during the RIPing stage, meaning the overlap of like colors will help close gaps to minimize show of little mistakes and errors not caught in the preflight area. Minor adjustments on either end can be crucial to how a finished product will look.

Sources:
McCue, Claudia. Print Production with Adobe Creative Suite Applications. Peachpit Press: Berkeley, CA, 2009.