The trade is dead

[Lammy]

{rant on} :x

I've had this week. Seems like no one anymore even knows what the hell printing is, never mind good design practices. Seems like everyone today is either taken a course to learn quark or just came out of school and learned only we design. They have a laptop and publisher and a cheap digital camera and want to know why WE have such a problem with their obviously perfect work. So help me if I hear once more "I just picked the color out of the palette, it should be fine" I'm gonna shove a pantone book up their arse! Or the all time favorite "It looks fine on my screen". Good God your a moron!!!! How hard is it to make a postcard on a 6" x 4" page instead of randomly floating it in the middle of a letter? Or when your PDF doesn't work, just give us the damn PM file instead of wasting my entire day "not letting it beat you". This is business you jerk! Time is money. It's not some game show were at the end you win valuable gifts and prizes!!!! The trade is dead. Obviously you don't need to have any knowledge or talent to be in it. Since the schools are teaching web and not teaching print, it's only a matter of time before no one is left that knows the difference between a trap and a knockout. Hell no ones gonna read anymore anyway. It's all just gonna get zapped right into our brains, right?

UGH!! I quit!! Stop the planet I want off!! I'm taking my ball and going home!!!!



:x :x :x :x :x :x

{rant off}

[JimG]

Lammy ROCKS


Jim George
Prepress Manager
Hitchcock Printing
New Britain, CT

[Cory]

Lammy,
while you are ranting, can I give you a couple of my clients numbers? :lol:

good stuff and couldn't agree more.

[Reese]

Yeah, I feel the same way. NO schooling at all (maybe in high school some) job exp, self taught and web research. I have been in this trade 10+ years and I'm getting pissed with the same people as you describe. They take what the salesman told them or read something, now they know more about then I do.

[CitrusZ28]

Originally Posted by Lammy

{rant on} :x

Or the all time favorite "It looks fine on my screen".



{rant off}

If I only had a dollar for every time I've heard that statement, I would'nt be posting here, hell I would'nt even be showing up for work at all because i would be STINKING RICH!

[tuff_gong]

One of my favorites: On getting a job with no printout, 200 postscript errors later, I call the cusomter who says, "Yeah, I couldn't get it to print either!"

[richsweeney]

I just had a customer create graduated screen boxes in ms publisher and cut and past them into pm. Works great after the file was rebuilt.

[Seth]

I hear you Lammy. I blame the personal computer. I'm an electronic prepress guy that goes back to the day of multi-million dollar, color electronic stripping systems. There was the Camex system, then the Crosfield 9700 studio. Operator training for the Crosfield was a month in England. Major investment in time and money to learn the "proper way". And, you had to have mechanical striiping background, since many fixes still had to be made on film.

All that was replaced with a Macintosh. Then everything got cheaper, and everybody could (and did) become the own shop. Once they booted their machine, printing "expertise" was "gained", simply because someone launched the software.

Secretaries and pimply-faced geekey nephews became "art" and "design" directors, since they could dazzled the boss with three-letter-acronyms. The boss was happy because he no longer had to pay a professional agency. In between answering the phone, the assistant could now crank-out color marketing print jobs.

If there were any problems -- it had to the print shop's fault -- cause the "instant printing expert", is a computer whiz. Thus, they know what they're doing. And in the virtual world, the physical "proof" of the mechanical method was gone. Can't put a loupe on the monitor, and check the overlays, and prove where the screw-up was at -- although these folks will swear, "it look good on my monitor".

I could go on but,..... but I gotta go figure out how to convert XML metadata in Postscript.

-Seth

[Lammy]

Crosfield 9700 studio

Ahhh what wonderful boat anchors those turned out to be. Place I worked put one in after we had several macs already. The operators were so frustrated with it they did 90% of the job on the Mac and output it through the 9700 just to please the owners.

[CitrusZ28]

Another boat anchor was the Kodak Designmaster. First Color house I worked at had one of those, it broke down about 3-4 times per week, got to be pretty good friends with the Kodak service guys. The kodak Prophecy was not much better, worked at a Color house that had one of those, we called it the electronic campfire, as the only time it was turned on was when the scanner operator was cold and he wanted to warm up his room.