Preflight: Why not collaborate?
I recently had a design colleague make a request of my business partner and I to preflight a flyer she was working. With the majority of her work being web design, she felt our collaboration would be beneficial to both her and her client. With experience in commercial and stationery printing, my partner and I feel we have a good grasp on what a printer usually looks for. I felt this was a very intelligent decision on her part and this request brought a question to my mind.
Why don’t more designers collaborate and have print designer with prepress experience preflight their work for them?
With networking and collaboration becoming second nature to most designers that work over the internet, it only seems right for this to happen. Unfortunately, I don’t think it is happening enough.
Preflight is an important step in the print design process that is often left out. I recently came across a great post on Designorati about preflight. Cate Indiano did a great job of breaking it down into two important areas in the post Preflighting: The Creatives vs The Producers. She explains what preflight is and why it is so important for both designers and production vendors.
For many young designers, I think there is a misconception that preflight is something that print shops are solely responsible for. This is untrue and can be a costly mistake. Cate does a great job of explaining exactly why it is important for designers to preflight.
She says,
“Early intervention is the key to later success. Who better to fix the failure than the creator in the first place? Once the project is released to the production vendor, your percentage of success begins to diminish as operators with no foreknowledge of your project are left to make possibly critical decisions about your work.”
This is so true!
If designers take the time to preflight their work, they would find that there are less costly errors, missed ship dates and all around fewer headaches.
The best part about networking and collaboration is that preflight doesn’t have to be something designers do for themselves. In some cases this might even be better because it places fresh eyes on the project. Fresh eyes tend to find things that the original designer might have overlooked.
So, how many print designers without prepress experience actually preflight their work? Do they rely heavily on the print shops to do the preflight? Maybe if these designers find a colleague who has a prepress background they too could save themselves time, money and headaches.
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