A typical newbie experience

Here’s a typical experience for an untrained graphic designer. For this example, we will assume our designer, Joe, has printing experience that is limited to his home printer and photocopiers:

Joe has a best friend who started an online business.  Joe designed a kick-ass logo and a website banner for her. He also created some of the graphics for her website. She’s thrilled.

Now Joe’s best friend wants business cards to hand out to prospective customers and drive new business to her website.

“Fantastic,” Joe thinks. “I already designed the logo. Now I just have to find a nice background photo and a cool typeface.” Joe hops online, finds tons of fun typefaces and a few photos that might be suitable. After some experimentation, the business card is complete. And Joe’s best friend loves it. “It’s beautiful…a masterpiece!”

Michelangelo couldn’t have done better.

Next, Joe downloads his creation onto a thumb drive and takes it to the local print shop. Joe explains what he needs to the person at the front counter. He’s told to expect a phone call in a week when the finished cards are ready to pickup.

But the call comes much sooner. Turns out the local print shop needs more than the one file that is on the thumb drive. Joe is puzzled. He doesn’t understand what his printer means when they say they need the supporting files: original logo, background photo and fonts. After a lengthy conversation with the print shop's prepress guy, Joe has a better understanding, but he points out, “My design printed out just fine from my printer at home.”  After more explanation, Prepress guy suggests a solution, “Bring us a PDF file with the elements embedded, bleeds extended and crop marks.” Joe agrees even though he has no idea what it means, but leaves with instructions on how to access the information on the printers website.

Of course, Joe doesn't download the instructions or printstyle from the printers website. He prints a PDF directly from his software using the PDF printer. After spending a few minutes making a PDF file, Joe heads back down to the print shop. And just in time too because the print shop is ready to close for the night. Joe is happy...there's been a little setback, but things are looking better.

Late the next day Joe gets another call. Prepress guy tells Joe “We can't work with your PDF file. The file is RGB, the images are low-resolution and the fonts aren't embedded in the PDF.” He shows Joe how to check the resolution of his images and how to make a good PDF file using a printstyle preset. Prepress guy copies the preset to Joe’s thumb drive along with step-by-step instructions to use it.

So Joe goes home a bit defeated, but determined to make it work this time. He now has some new tools and knows how to make a good PDF. And after a few attempts to make a PDF file using the instructions from Prepress guy, Joe decides to check online to see if there’s another local printer that works later hours. Instead, Joe finds a printer online that can print business cards for a much better price than what his local print shop quoted.

“Wow. I’m so glad I checked.” Joe is elated…and he just saved his friend a lot of money. A boatload of money. And the cards will be ready much sooner.

“Good thing too, my friend needs these cards this weekend.” Joe is very excited as he downloads the newly created PDF to the online website.

Several days later Joe gets a package in the mail. “It must be the business cards.” Joe is excited, calls his friend and they meet to unveil the masterpiece. Joe pulls some cards from the package and spreads them across the table with a florish. “Ta da!”

But the look on his friends face is far from happy.

Joe takes a closer look at the cards and is horrified by what he sees. The background photo is not the bright happy colors he saw on his computer monitor. Instead of a smooth photo, it’s a bunch of big blurry rectangles. And the kick-ass logo that Joe designed for the website has raggedy edges.  “What's with this typeface? It's not the font I used. Why did the printer use Courier?” As he slams the cards onto the table he rants, “What is wrong with these printers? They can’t even get a simple business card right!”

Needless to say, Joe is not happy with the results of his hard work. Something so easy, turned out horribly wrong. And the online printer won’t reprint the cards nor refund his money. Not a good way to start his design career. And all because Joe doesn't know the basic rules of file preparation for printing.

So how do you prevent this from happening to you?

Simple, you learn the basics of prepress.

Stay tuned to learn the basics.