5 SEO Basics to Make Your Best Content Eminently Findable
Whew! You’re exhausted. You’ve just finished a sprint to get your mobile-first site updated after Google’s latest Core Web Vitals algorithm change....
2 min read
Dave Bowers : 5/11/17 10:00 AM
Good prepress file preparation takes time. In the era of digital design, prepress work looks deceptively easy, but making sure your files are print ready takes time to do well. Integrated marketing campaigns that combine traditional and digital materials can be ruined during their launch by poor quality print work or an error. Unlike a digital design, your sloppy printed piece is time consuming and costly to correct, reprint and ship back out for distribution.
Comps are now done with the look of final art. Gone are the charcoal, watercolor, and pencil art sketches that used to be used to present design concepts to clients. Now we are often likely to email or post a PDF of a concept to discuss on a conference call rather than make a presentation board and present the concept in person. This can create a misperception.
Modern software tools give a finished, polished look to even the roughest ideas, which requires less imagination and make-believe to visualize the finished product. Because of these very polished preliminary drafts, it seems like the production of a final file once a concept has been approved should take only minutes — but it doesn’t.
There are hours of work to take a digital concept to finished print product. For example, we have a checklist with twenty-eight steps to produce a final 4-color print ad from an approved design. While none of this is the fun and creative part of the process, it is necessary to deliver a quality print-ready advertising file for production in a magazine or newspaper.
Designer
Proofing
Most of the steps in our advertising print production checklist are simple and normal creative production workflow. Some are the result of experience earned on how to make a file most likely to be compatible for any print publication and reduce the risk of unintended color shifts and “drop outs”.
We also clearly separate the proofing from the design function. It’s important to have a set of “fresh eyes” view the files. Here's a favorite digital example of why making the time for separate proofing steps is important - we got a chuckle when we ran across this ad on a wind (ahem) industry website.
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