Commercial Printing: A designer’s survival guide

I spent my first 5 years as a graphic designer painfully learning the ins and outs of commercial printing. It seems that I’m not alone as I talk to friends and interns that are graduating from schools that taught them great design but left them ill-prepared to get their projects to come out right on paper. This is not a dig on art and design schools, most of them offer prepress classes and have the necessary materials available to enlighten students. But because it’s not required in many disciplines, a lot of students don’t realize the potentially huge role that commercial printing can play in their future success.

This is not an in-depth guide. This is a survival guide, based on my own personal experience and mistakes. If you want to learn about printing there are a plethora of good books available. Getting it Right in Print is a great quick read, if you can forgive numerous grammatical errors.

So here are a few things that I wish I’d done differently…

Ask Questions

When a print rep offers you a coating, asks for a file type or questions you about something you don’t understand, don’t wait to ask questions. I have a nasty habit of wanting to sound like I know what I’m talking about and it’s gotten me in plenty of trouble. You’ll have to ask what stochastic printing is eventually, so you might as well admit that you don’t know when it comes up. You’ll need to know the definitions and uses of things like color profiles, color gamuts, offset printing, line screen, moire patterns\screen clash, dot gain, spot colors, Pantone, etc. Asking questions is a very quick way to get answers. If you’re stubborn, or if you don’t have anyone to ask, pick up a good book. Seriously.

Find out what the printer wants

Most printers will accept a multitude of filetypes. But they usually have a workflow that performs best if given the right input. Find out what it is that your printer works with and give it to them the way they want. My favorite format to submit to printers is PDF-X1a. If they can handle that then I tend to get results that closely resemble what I saw on my screen. Ask your printer for a pre-flight checklist and follow it closely. If nothing else, it can help you remember to get the right profile on your images and prevent you from letting an RGB image slip by. InDesign and Quark have decent packaging and preflighting tools, so use them.

Proof. Proof again. Then pad.

Don’t assume that you’ll make changes on press. That wastes time and money and doesn’t make printers happy, and doesn’t usually lend itself to providing the desired results. Pay for proofs, make the necessary changes and proof again. And again if you have to. Show the client the final set of proofs. Build the proofing process into your charges. It’s also a good idea to ask the printer to build in the proofing, make-ready and overrun charges into their estimate to prevent surprises on the client’s end. Most clients are not aware that some or all of those charges may be billed in addition to the quote they were given. A 10% overrun is standard, so if your printer didn’t build it in, pad it on to the estimate you give your client.

A good printer works best when you give them perfect proofs. Show them exactly what you want and then leave it in their hands to get the color right. When color is critical, don’t be shy about asking to do a press check, but trust the press operator to make the adjustments. If he or she isn’t capable of meeting your needs, you’re probably working with the wrong printer. Which leads me to…

Get pushy

You can ask a lot of a printer. You can ask them to push the inks, push the blacks, account for drift in the imposition, print on house stock to save money, etc. A lot of these things won’t happen if you don’t ask for them, at least in my experience. I’ve learned to be very specific about the stock and coating I want on a job. If you don’t know the technical specs of what you want, take your rep a sample of something you’d like to imitate and let them figure it out. They can easily determine the weight and coating of a postcard you hand them. Make sure to take notes on the specs of each job so you’ll know what to ask for in the future. You’ll build a library of favorites over time and as you come to understand the differences, you’ll be able to mix specs to create specialty jobs.

Don’t waste time on mistakes

If you get everything right and provide perfect proofs and still get back less than satisfactory results, find a new printer. A printer is only as good as the combination of their presses and press operators and not much is going to change if you keep giving them more chances. If a printer has consistently provided you with good results and then made a mistake, then by all means ask them to fix it and continue using that printer. But if you smell a rat, get out. There are always other options. Even working with printers out of town/state is not that difficult, if you pick a good one. Calibrated screens make pdf proofing possible, FedEx makes overnight proofing a breeze (in most cases), and if the printer is good you shouldn’t need to be on press for the final run. If I find a printer out of town that I want to try out, I usually send them a smaller, less critical job and let them do their best on it. They’ll usually do a bang-up job even on a short-run postcard because they want to impress you as a new client. If I get back good color, properly trimmed, without streaks or other mishaps and the job is done on time, I’ll usually consider using them despite the possibility of a 3 hour drive.

Always get the samples first

Don’t let a client call you and ask why the color is off on a product you haven’t seen yet. Demand samples from the beginning and end of the run be delivered to you before the client whenever possible. If something is terribly wrong, you’ll have the heads up to make arrangements for re-printing. If the client gets it first, you’d better believe it’ll be your head on a stick, not the printer’s. Keep in mind that things change over large runs, so pull as many random samples as you can to compare color and quality.

In closing

Remember, printers make mistakes, but you can’t afford to. You have to hold your printer accountable for every problem they cause. You also have to be ready to take responsibility for problems that you caused because you didn’t know what you were doing. Ask every question up front. If you asked a question and got an answer, guess what? It just became their responsibility. So document your dialogs, preferably via email.

This is by no means exhaustive. There is a lot to know about printing and I’m not about to go rewriting any books that are already out there. Just sharing some real-world experience. I hope that your print adventures go smoothly!

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