Being creative in prepress

[Earendil]

Before coming to the heavy production environment I'm in now, I used to do photo manipulation and design at a high end sheetfed shop and I loved it, it just didn't pay as well. I still do freelance at home and it's fun.

I have worked with some of the top design firms in my area and one thing they have taught me is to only give the client so much room for input because clients will screw up a good design every time. "I want the logo to fill half the page etc..." I like to stick to my guns when it comes to design and have come to the point of losing a brochure job because I didn't want to do what the client wanted. It ended up coming through my shop in the end and it looked hideous! LOL

I didn't get the money for design but it was worth it to not produce something like that.

People don't know how to make something look good, that's why they come to us.

[Yez]

Originally Posted by born2print

(I'm a production person rather than an artist) and it seems to me that I'm rarely "happy" with my designs...
they get by, mostly.
I guess about 1 of 5 are pretty good on average

I can blame short turn around, but I also have a lack of talent and almost no design assets... just some magazines, a book and "art explosion 40000" that is older than God's dog.

Same here. I like the challenge of setting up the art and making it work. I also enjoy lots of pain (I work on the flexography side).

Sales comes to me with "can you design this?" or "my customer wants us to try some things.". I just tell them (nicely) "It's really not my bag, baby."

[tony_mclachlan]

Hi all,

Relatively new here but I'll chime in with my background... I've been in prepress 10 years now. My training was in digital prepress but every job I have had has called upon me being a designer at some stage or another. I feel that I am fairly accomplished in the design area but yes, it can be disheartening putting your all into a layout only to have the customer reject it straight up. I run my own design business on the side and its just part of the flow I think, you might hit it straight up or its back to the drawing board. I try not to take any design proposal rejections personally, "the customer is always right" so they say, and hopefully you have an arrangement where alts/re-designs can be charged. I do feel though that my prepress background can also be used as a selling point when dealing with clients as a guarantee that this new logo/layout/design can be printed no hassles anywhere (often I don't organise printing) without the extra charges some printers will try to add on..

Cheers, Tony