 Yeah, the phone! Well, my experience in being at the receiving end of these sorts of projects for many years, I think I can help. Below are a few ideas to turn a potential disaster into a success story. 1)Communicate! If you have one of those projects that is already late, a preliminary phone call to the print shop to let them know a project is on the way down always helps. This ensures all materials can be ready, i.e. tabs, binding material, special covers, special paper, and most importantly to help them schedule run time on machines. Also worst case scenario, you learn that a “machine is down”. Knowing this before you walk in the door helps the stress level. 2)Choose your program? Let the print shop know what program you are using to produce your project... do they say “no problem?” Or possibly a long pause - “uh yeah I think so...” Not a good answer. Regardless of what program you are using check to see if it can save the file as a PDF. The nifty thing about this is once made, you can look at it using Acrobat Reader (free download – most computers already have preloaded too). This eliminates weird page break issues, font issues, and graphic issues (98% of the time at least). Check under FILE - EXPORT, or FILE - SAVE AS. 3)Print a copy to take with the CD Giving the print shop a copy of what the project is supposed to look like will save you countless phone calls should something go awry. Without it, they really have no idea what a project is supposed to look like. For example, a MS Word document form one computer to another, can really look and print shockingly different. 4)Proof it! I know time is of the essence, but I truly cannot count how many times a customer doesn't want to proof something, 500 copies of it get printed, and it's wrong (funny though there is always time to re-print). In the long run, you really will be saving time by taking a moment to really look at a copy off the shop's machines. By bolding “really”, I'm emphasizing the tendency to merely glance a proof over, not really looking at it, but then actually proofing it when 5,000 brochures just got printed.  Ezine Articles "If I only had a nickel for the number of times this happened"... you know the rest of the saying. -Pat Pelzel |
Please, take a look around here, among print related pieces, I've set up several CMS websites using Joomla, where the end-user (you) can run the whole thing without having to call the "web-guy" (me). Pretty exciting, and in a lot of cases, the future of websites as I see it. So give me a call, or drop a note, and together we can hit the taget with your next project!