friggin' designers

[dlw2x2]

H.R. Puffin Stuff...Sid & Marty Kroft...

I loved all those shoes...

Ahhhh, the good ol' days....

[dlw2x2]

oooppss ops:

I mean shows.....

[urstwile]

Hi, well, I'm new to this forum, but just read pretty much all the way through the thread. I have some history of my own (sorry to the poster who wondered about those who say they have 20+ years experience, I have 28 ).

I started off as a trainee in a typeshop (1978), using CCI front end computers, the disks were these big deep dish pizza shaped thingies. Fonts, initially, were on these strips shaped like the negatives you get from a film camera, then they were on 5-1/4" floppies that were loaded into the VIP typesetters (it's been a while, so I might not have accurately called out the name), anything above about 24 point type was set on the typositor machine. Mechanicals were stripped together (initially) with wax machines as the adhesive base. Then the miracle of film stripping came along. LOL. But we could still only image things up to 12" wide, so anything that needed to be wider than that needed to be set so that the overlap would butt correctly for the strippers. I actually miss the H&J numbers that the CCI and later Magna code would display so you could check the accuracy of your positioning.

Now I'm doing all this stuff on a Mac. It's opened up my skill set beyond belief, but I've been out of the real pre-press world for close to ten years. Up until that time, I was on a Mac, but we had AGFA image setters, doing Postscript, I even learned some Postscript code to do in-position rotations and such (pre-Mac production days), etc.

I do work in an ad agency now, as opposed to a pre-press shop (>>>covering head from hail of curses raining down), and I like to keep up with everything, but I find that being out of that world on a full time basis, there are a lot of things I just don't know anymore. I rely on forums like these to keep me in the loop, as well as the vendors we use at the agency I work for.

One little peeve I have, but I think this is because I strive for trouble free files, is when a vendor just corrects something for me and doesn't tell me that they did. I hate not knowing that there was something I could have done better, or should I say, more perfectly.

I always call a print vendor when I'm not sure about whether what I'm going to send them will work. Especially, right now, anyway, with InDesign, which we finally got going at the agency, and so I'm sending more files that way.

Some cooperate, some don't, it all depends on who I'm talking to. I know from my own experience on the other side of the desk, however, that unless the owner has no problem with it, that sometimes pre-press production people can't, or won't, tell a customer that um, no, that just won't work. This has been my experience at least in some instances, and it makes me really uncomfortable. I wish I could just call up Bob or Nancy in the production department and ask them "No seriously, is this really cool to do?" Again, many are trying to satisfy the "be polite to the customer" thing their boss has probably drilled into their head, but it's often hard for me, because I'm skeptical as to whether or not they're placating me, because as I see in the above posts in this thread, there's a perception about stuff coming from designers (which I'm not, I'm more a production artist), in that it's going to be inherently bad or screwed up, if you will.

Anyway, that's my story. I hope to learn a lot here, and keep in the loop about things I've been feeling out of the loop on lately.

[prepress_goddess]

urstwile - you must one of the rare designers that actually listens to the printer in how to submit your files. Most of the designers I deal with on a daily basis are too egotistical to listen to anyone on how to set up files. They take it a slam against their design if you call and tell them that the file is no good, or that it will take hours to make the project printable

anyway - welcome to the forum, you'll learn lots here

[urstwile]

Thanks for the welcome!

[hotmetal]

Originally Posted by urstwile

One little peeve I have, but I think this is because I strive for trouble free files, is when a vendor just corrects something for me and doesn't tell me that they did. I hate not knowing that there was something I could have done better, or should I say, more perfectly.

Please keep trying, you're doing everything right on your end. I've about given up on trying to get information to clients - the salespeople either filter it to gibberish or plain refuse to pass it on for fear of embarrasing the client - infering that they don't know what they're doing.

[Lorem_Ipsum]

I'm adding my photoshop horror story.

Today I received a 2-sided, 4-fold, 4 colour job with perfs and glue to be added.

It was created in photoshop with no bleeds, no fonts included for the type, the type was a mix of colours (which needed to be edited), 71 layers (with many non-used layers still there--which makes life difficult to edit) and it the file is RGB.

Oh yeah, they sent 6 different versions and wanted them to be completed by tomorrow?

WTF?! :x

[hotmetal]

yeah, what's this crap about setting type in Photoshop all about, anyways? How much dumber can these people get?

And Photoshop, of course, doesn't bother to tell you which fonts are in the file when you get that error message, and since it's probably a 2GB file, it still takes a while to open ('specially if you're dumb enough to be opening it over a busy network) and then, if you are clever about such things, you can go through the type layers and ID the fonts, which you may be able to find and open - the clients who set type in Photoshop never send them for some reason (dumb as boxes of rocks?) - then you have to go through opening the file again because Photoshop doesn't seem to update itself when you open a suitcase.

Yes, you can do this shit. Please don't.

[mc_hristel]

We have one customer who sets up everyhing in Photoshop, built type and all. They usualy just give us flattened .tiff files so there is no font substitution, but also no chance to fix things. We've had fit problems on press because of it, but they are nice enough to provide plenty of bleed. Sadly, when I explained the problem with type in Photoshop the customer got mad and threatened to go somewhere else. Being a big customer, now I just ignore the Photoshop type and we deal with it on press. <sigh>

-MC