friggin' designers

[RIP_SLAVE]

I think your customer is sending work to me...

My boss hands me a disk it is packaged ransom note style, you know, an 8.5x11 piece of paper with handwriting on it rubber-banded to the cd. The note says "here is the file we talked about I hope you can open it."
(Yes, we all in pp have superpowers)
"I can't call my advertiser so we need to make this work."
The file is an 8.5 x 11 PDF created by Amyuni PDF Converter, from what original I can only guess.
While we can "open" it the note describes placing it in his supplied PageMaker 6.0 layout enlarged to fit an 11 x 14 bound tab page.
I give this "Designer" a call and am told that if we can open it we should be able to use Photoshop to make it fit. After explaining why we don't like to do this the reply is "that is the way I do most of the ads in my paper."

Oh well at least I tried.

[mc_hristel]

I got a job in today for an insert from the local paper. No bleed needed, all the black type was just black, and the graphics were CMYK. True, the graphics are crappy and bitmaped, but I nearly fell out of my chair due to my suprise. 8O I had been getting myself mentally ready for a big convert everything to solid black project.

What does that say about the expectations I have for these people? Yikes :!:

[prepress_goddess]

expect the worst and you'll never be disappointed, but occasionally pleasantly surprised!

[macandy]

Received artwork via email yesterday which I rejected because the image was an obvious screen capture, sent back to me later with a note from CSR saying that artwork is acceptable because customer knows that screen captures are always low res so they opened the offending file and upsampled it in photoshop.
I give up

[Jezza]

Originally Posted by macandy

upsampled it in photoshop.
I give up

Bicubic or nearest neighbor? I bet they wouldn't even know the difference. I feel for you

[macandy]

Its ok I was only trying to save the customer the ?35 proof charge but if they really want me to print it I will

[jason]

I give up

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

[Thorzdad]

~a designer wades into the kill zone~
I sympathize completely with everything you guys have said. I learned my skils back in the day when a type gauge and proportion wheel were your best friends. I see crap like you describe everyday. For instance...today I was called by a new client (she's a one-person "marketing" firm) She wanted me to take a look at a booklet another designer had done for her. She wanted my opinion on how to "tighten" it up. Uh oh.
Well, I got the CD. Illustrator layouts. No problem. But...all photos...embedded! And, surprise, not all of the original photos are on the CD. What photos that are on the CD are a mishmash of 300, 313, 150, and 72 dpi images. RGB, of course. Nothing properly rescaled an cropped. All cropping/scaling done in Illustrator. Good grief.
Oh yeah...and no fonts on the CD.
Guess, what? She's a second-year design student.
Schools today are teaching the kids how to make things pretty. But they don't teach them jack about the nuts and bolts of their chosen profession. Nothing about file prep. It's all about web. Print seems to be an afterthought.
That's one problem.
Another problem I'll bet you're dealing with is that a lot of these "designers" you are having to deal with aren't trained designers. They're office help that got saddled with designing the company brochure. Sadly, I see this as a growing trend in my world. Why pay someone with actual training when Becky the receptionist can learn Photoshop?
And, yeah, I've done an entire, text-heavy brochure in Photoshop. The client insisted on it. Seems he had a copy of Pshop and wanted to be able to "tweek" the text whenever he needed.

[prepress_goddess]

an update on my photoshop brochure - the designer didn't take into account how the brochure folded and put the text right up against the folds, ran copy up against the cut and had no consistency with the phone numbers. some had parenthesis around the area code, some had dots instead of dashes, some had dashes, some had spaces etc. LOTS of typos - sales finally said reset and do it right rather than wrestle with these 200 layer photoshop files

never the same sh*t when you're wiping designer's butts, but if it weren't for their incompitence, we'd be out of jobs.

grrrrr

[LoganBlade]

The answer to it all just came to me..
We stop calling it prepress and have the owner tell them we are designers that help make the work printable then they can charge $100 an hour for the work... :wink: