How to Script the Perfect Printed Piece
Just as an actor needs to know his lines for the play to work, we need to understand exactly what you are looking for when you order a print job from us. To better facilitate our ongoing discussion, we have produced the following checklist. Think of it as a script and your printed piece as the finished play:
General Printing Issues
1. What kind and quantity of inks are you using (spot or process color)?
2. What kind of paper or other material do you want to print on?
3. How big is the print run (1,000, 10,000, 100,000)?
4. What kind of binding or bindery work do you need?
5. What kind of spot or flood coatings do you need?
6. Do we need to match the color of an existing printed piece?
7. Are there large areas of heavy ink coverage?
8. Do you have crossovers (where an image is printed on two pages) or other complicated layout or pagination issues?
9. Are there any budgetary or scheduling issues we need to know about?
Prepress and File Preparation Issues
1. In order to meet our agreed-upon deadline, when do we need electronic layout files from you?2. What kind of proof do you require?
3. Have you preflighted your files (either by hand or by using preflight software such as FlightCheck)?
4. Have you prepared your file for print by pulling all bleeds, removing any extraneous images or notes from the files, and double-checked your spelling, addresses and other crucial information?
5. Do we need to do any work to your images to prepare them for print (scanning, color correction, resizing, etc.)?
6. Will you make sure you sent us all required image files?
7. Will you provide us with copies of your fonts?
8. Will you provide us with 100%-sized laser prints so we can check your files?
We generally follow this basic script every time we talk with you. Now that you know our lines, we can both play our parts to perfection.
