Tips, tricks and advice for advertising management and print production.
Jennifer | 3:38 pm | January 21, 2008 | budgets, ads, prepress, process, workflow, planning, plan, General
All of your electronic artwork - support files, final ads, standards manuals, etc…. Are digital assets. It can be difficult to keep your files organised and even more difficult to ensure your suppliers and clients have access to them. There are online sites that make this simpler.
If you need to have offsite backup (that is, you need your files to survive your office burning down) you can use simple storage facilities such as X-drive. If you want a more robust solution that allow not just file management, but full search facilities and the ability to have clients work off your files, there are wide-ranging sites such as Corbis’ Media Management service, which supplies the option of fully automatic file storage, archiving and retrieval.
Guess which service is more expensive.
There are a number of solutions available to you. As always, they’re only worth as much as you’re willing to work with them. It’s still up to you to ensure everything is kept up to date and proper search terms (if applicable) are generated for each shot. If your supplier is going to allow clients to customize art based on templates you’ve uploaded, test those applications over and over. Find the least tech-savvy person you know and have them go through the steps. You need to be sure it’ll work for everyone. Otherwise it’ll end up being an exercise in frustration for you and your clients.
Jennifer | 10:19 am | January 11, 2008 | prepress, terminology, printing, process, workflow, General
Production works in acronyms, here are some you might come across:
Other terms and phrases you might hear thrown around include…
Working files. When someone requests working files, they are asking for the files used to generate the graphics. This means fonts, images as separate files that are linked to the page layout file. Working files are necessary if adjustments might need to be made. For example, you would send your printer working files if there was concern that some photos might need to have adjustments made.
PDF/X1-a. PDF files can take many forms, they can be small files meant only to be used on screen, or highly specific files made to run on presses. The PDF-X series are common formats used in printing, and PDF/X1-a is usually the file type requested by most magazines.
I’ll keep posting more as I think of them. After awhile all these terms become a part of everyday language, it gets difficult to remember what isn’t common knowledge!
Jennifer | 10:00 am | January 7, 2008 | suppliers, budgets, workflow
Over the past year, several newspapers have sent their page layout, copyediting, ad production and in a few cases reporting, to Indian outsourcing companies.
It will be interesting to see how having people who live in a different culture handle the design and production of print media considered a crucial voice in a local market. Will they use starbursts? How will they feel about adding snipes? These Indian workers will be fluent in English, but the question remains of their skills with typography in Western lettering.
The question of whether or not design firms and ad agencies could follow in the newspapers lead is there. Certainly creating a brochure can be more complex, but not necessarily. Many Designers could build tight comps and ship those to India to have Production Artists there create press-ready files to match.
Of course, what gets missed in this is the ability for the Designer and Production Artist to work together to solve problems. Typically the Production department inside creative industries has been one of bridging ideas and realistic expectations. Outsourcing could mean that the generic 4c work goes overseas, leaving more complex pieces for Production staffers here to do.
I don’t think this system will be the death of many jobs. Already we’re seeing fewer applicants for Production artist positions as most head over to the area on New Media. It’ll be interesing to see what happens over the next few years - if this works, or if some work comes back to western copy rooms.