By: Erik Vlietinck
Tue, April 22, 2008 - 9:34:00

I keep hearing those complaints of prepress people about graphic designers not bothering to check their layout documents for errors that will pop up when printing the file. Colour space problems are always among those topics raised, but font problems and line thickness, the use of gradients, transparency, etc. are raised just as often. Living in the cross-media publishing world we do these days, I rarely hear those complaints from web “prepress” departments. It made me think about what graphic and layout designers should know.

The traditional view of a graphic or layout designer’s job is that he/she creates the design and the man or woman next in the workflow will handle the output of that design. In that view, designers are purely creative and shouldn’t bother about the limitations of the equipment and the media which will become the carrier of their work. This is fine when you’re only dealing with screen output, or if you’re dealing with web publishing and in-house printing.

If the work needs to be printed on the press of a commercial printer, the odds are the printer will either have a prepress department or will reject jobs that do not output on their printing presses. Most printers that have survived the economic dips we have had in the past will employ at least a couple of people who can deal with prepress problems.

Full Control Over Looks

The issue here is whether printers or prepress people should have to deal with files that cannot be printed without intensive re-editing. My view of that issue is that they shouldn’t. I’ll explain why not. Top commercial photographer John Tromp once said to me: “I want to know as much as I can about the output process --both RGB and CMYK-- so I can have full control over how the image will look once it’s been printed. I want it to look just the way I intended it to.”

Another top commercial photography service provider, Jack Lowe in the UK, shares this view with John Tromp, his Dutch colleague. Photographers seem to care a lot about how their images will look when output to any media. The top photographers will do everything it takes to learn about the output processes, in order to plan ahead how their images should look on screen in order to have them look just right on paper, the web, a mobile phone, etc.

Photographers have little to care for: they “only” have to deal with colour spaces and colour management in general. Graphic designers have more to deal with. They will have to consider colour management, line thickness, gradients, transparency, fonts, etc.

I may have forgotten about some elements of attention here, but you get my point. A graphic or layout designer has a lot more on his plate than just colour management if he were to be responsible for the whole prepress process. Despite the task being much more burdensome, I believe designers should care more.

Just as photographers, they should keep total control over the output process. If they don’t, some prepress pro will change the elements of the design that can’t be output to the medium correctly or without major problems. Products like Enfocus Neo put the prepress people in the driver’s seat. Neo enables a prepress professional to drastically change a design --"drastic" meaning: everything from line thickness to position on the page, to text size and font choice.

Prepress Change Design

Of course prepress pros will never go as far as change your design so that you won’t recognise it anymore, but the fact remains they shouldn’t have to change anything at all. Neo shouldn’t have to exist. It exists partly because designers don’t care enough, while they can easily prevent most problems by running a preflight check before handing off the file to the printer.

Such preflight checks can be done with an application such as FlightCheck or one of its competitors. Fact of the matter is that preflighting should be standard procedure while designing in InDesign or QuarkXPress. Preflighting prevents design problems from becoming prepress problems. Personally, I also don’t think you should wait until the file is output to PDF before taking corrective actions. When a file is exported to PDF, the design has already been finalised into a stage where corrections demand too much energy and time from both designer and printer, resulting in higher costs than necessary.

Preflighting is one component, communication is another. Enfocus has a web site called CertifiedPDF.net. This web site is dedicated to certified PDf standards and enables subscribed printers and publishers to publish their PDF/x requirements --tuned to their equipment. It’s a relatively successful attempt to automating the communication between designer and printer. In my opinion, it is underused.

More of these networks should be “marketed” for a larger number of output and publishing standards. Designers should perhaps also learn to pick up the phone and ask the printer what he needs, and printers should perhaps make an effort and describe in an easy-to-read document what their press can handle, and what it cannot. Imagine the time savings when that would be common procedure.