Printing Tips: Go from Hard Drive to Hard Copy

Designing a poster, brochure, newsletter, or anything else on your computer screen can be a lot of fun. But what happens when it’s time to move your creations from your hard drive to hard copy? Will your files work once they’re at the printer’s office? How do you get your client to approve your design concepts? Whether you’re a recent design graduate or have more passion for design than print experience, we have a few tips to help you get started.
1. Ask Questions
This is the single most useful piece of advice in this article, so I’ll repeat it with every following tip. No matter who you work with, from client to photographer to printer to mailing house rep, ask them as many questions as you can think of, including “What else should I be asking you?” If you’re just starting out in print design, the odds are excellent that your collaborators have more experience than you do. Use that to your advantage — respect their expertise and learn as much as you can from it.
2. Talk to the Printer
Because you want your publication to be produced on time and on budget, the first person you should speak to is the representative from the printing company you’ll hire. Here are some critical questions to ask:
What’s your turnaround time? Turnaround time partly depends on how you design your piece. Are you using 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 colors of ink? Varnishes? Die-cuts? The simpler your design (one color of ink on white paper with no photographs or bleeds is about as simple as it gets), the faster the printer can produce your piece. To give you a feel for the different time spans, ask the print rep for examples of their work and the timelines for each piece. For example, a 64-page four-color brochure could take 15 working days while a simple one-color newsletter that’s a single sheet of 11-inch x 17-inch paper folded to letter size could probably be produced in three to five working days.
How much do different types of jobs cost? Again, ask to look at samples of their work (you’ll want to do this anyway so you know that their work is high-quality), and ask about prices for similar jobs. Up to a certain point, the more copies you print, the less expensive the job is per piece, so you’ll want to find out where that breaking point is. Odds are, a hundred extra copies may only cost you a fraction more.
What software do you prefer? What platform should I use? Do you prefer PDFs or native files? Not every printer is familiar with every software package. Make sure you design the piece in a way that works with their equipment. Even though Adobe InDesign is an industry standard, I’ve met printers who can’t accept those files, while some printers aren’t comfortable working with PC files or certain types of fonts. Before you spend the time creating files your printer can’t use, ask the right questions.
What else should I know?
Some mistakes are common no matter how long you’ve been in the print design business. Watch out for these gotchas:

• Forgetting the multiple of four rule: when you really get going on a design, it’s easy to forget that all those pages are connected, and your publication needs to be in multiples of four: four, eight, 12, or 16 pages.
• Using the wrong kinds of image files. I’ve seen professionals send low-resolution .PICT files and .GIF logos captured from a company’s Web site to press. Remember to check with the printer about proper resolution and formats when preparing art.
• Forgetting (or being too cost conscious) to ask for image proofs adjusted for dot-gain. Different kinds of paper soak up ink at different rates, so be sure you know what you’re getting before you send the job to press. Proofs are an extra expense, but asking for them costs a lot less than reprinting the publication.

A few printers post all of this information — turnaround time, price, acceptable formats, and more — on their Web sites. For an example, see PrintingForLess.com. [Note that PrintingForLess.com is creativepro.com’s parent company.] 3. Talk to the Mailing House
If you’re creating a direct-mail piece, talk to the mailing house before you design. Post office rules do change, and the size, shape, and weight of your piece all affect the cost. Be sure you know what costs you’re committing your client to before the piece is printed.
4. Talk to the Photographer
Once again, make sure you know exactly how you’re spending your client’s budget. Before you contract with a photographer, find out more than just their hourly rate. Determine how many photos you get, in what format and when they’ll be delivered, and discuss who owns what rights to the art. If a photographer takes 100 photographs on a shoot for you, it’s a mistake to assume you’ll be receiving 100 photographs — or that you’ve bought the rights to use those images in more than one publication.
5. Talk to your Client — and Listen
After you’ve covered the above bases, share your knowledge! Communicate to the client exactly what their costs will be and what they’ll receive for their money.
Even more importantly, listen to your client. What are the stated goals for the project? What are additional goals you’ll discover only by asking? Review the client’s other publications and find out how well they met the client’s goals. How did the audience react to them? Make sure you know all the audiences the publication is trying to reach (there’s rarely just one). Ask if you and your client can talk to the audience together. Before you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a press run, you need to know that the piece is reaching the intended audience. A good way to do this is to organize a focus group. Gather some audience members and some competitors’ publications. Ask the audience what speaks to them. Which pieces communicate the right and wrong messages? Don’t stop when you find out what they like and dislike — ask why. If you and your client both attend the focus group, you’ll come to the project with a common understanding of what does and doesn’t work for your audience.
6. Don’t Talk About Design
Once you’ve designed a piece that is cost effective, will print correctly, meets the client’s goals, and effectively reaches the audience, present the information to the client in just those terms. It’s easy to talk about how much time you spent picking the typeface and why this is the perfect font because the typographer was born in the same year as the subject of an article, but the client isn’t interested. Don’t talk about your goal to make the piece beautiful and to show off your creativity. Talk about why and how the publication will accomplish the client’s goals, and how test audiences react to it. In other words, the best way to get your design approved is not to talk about design.
Taking your design from pixels on a screen to a printed piece can be a complicated journey. But if you follow the suggestions above and remember to ask, ask, ask, soon you’ll be the old hand others come to for advice.