Prepress Process

I’ve had the good luck to have had several mentors over the course of my career as a graphic designer, and one of the most important things I have learned since getting out of school is how to prepare a document for print. In the interest of hopefully helping some greener designers avoid some of the same mistakes I made—and the millions of other mistakes that are out there for the making—here is a comprehensive list to run through with any and every print document you send off. A lot of these seem like no-brainers, but you’d be surprised the asinine things you can pull off at the end of a project when all you want is to never see it again.

• Use a good printer. Marks of a good printer, in my opinion, include: they let you out on the press floor to talk to the pressman, they care about color matching as much as or more than you do, and they let you know ahead of time if you’re doing something stupid. They will also admit and own up to their mistakes without you threatening lawsuits!
• Send the correct and complete files. This can get especially tricky if you are sending something to print straight out of Illustrator rather than InDesign. Since there’s no built-in packaging function, you must make sure you outline or embed all linked fonts and images. Even with InDesign, you must make sure you pay attention to what it’s telling you—are all fonts and images properly linked? If you changed anything after packaging, make sure the updated files are safely tucked into your links folder.
• Check the document specs. Whether you have a print fulfillment specialist on staff or set up your own print job bids, make sure that what you are sending to print is what the printer expects. Make sure the printer has ordered the paper you’re expecting and didn’t cheap out (this would be an indication of a NON good printer).
• Check that things fit together. Make sure each item in a multi-piece job fits happily with the others (datasheets within a folder, business cards in slits, cards in envelopes). Paper has thickness; always ask for advice from your printer or paper rep if you don’t know how much allowance to leave.
• Pull out bleeds. Bleeds are an allowance of extra photo/color/element that extends past where the project will be trimmed, to account for any inaccuracy or creep that occurs during the print job. Standard is 1/8 inch, but for larger things like signs and fabric printing, you should always check with the vendor. I have had to add up to an inch before. This can mean extending a boring area of a photo or graphic, or (after you have done it a few times) you learn to think ahead and work this into the comp so as not to have to change it later and find you don’t have enough resolution.
• Check out the gutter. Make sure nothing is so close to the binding edge of the book that you won’t be able to see it without ruining the binding. It should feel airy and bright in there.
• Spell-check CAREFULLY. The spell-check function in InDesign is a bit flawed in that when you close it, you are sometimes left highlighting the last word you were checking (happens with find-and-replace too). If you happen to then hit a key command like “w” to toggle your view, you can replace innocent, highlighted word and really screw things up.
• Quadruple-check things on master pages. While master pages are wonderful tools for efficiency, they are also multipliers of errors. If you, for instance, make the error above where you replace a word with “w” in a footer that’s perfectly consistent on ALL PAGES, your boss will be VERY UPSET.
• Make sure image boxes have no background color. If you happened to comp your images in with gray boxes like I often do, make sure they have NO color by the time you print. The gray can keep your images from showing up in their brightest form and really give you a headache as you try to figure that one out.
• Check to make sure the colors are as expected. If you’re printing a 4-color job, you shouldn’t have any pantones showing up in your swatches palette. Preflight will help you diagnose this. If the offending color won’t delete, it’s probably in a linked piece of artwork. You can hunt this down, or you can simply convert it to CMYK in InDesign to save time. If you ARE using pantones, make sure they are the right ones and that you don’t have extras. Make sure your printer is expecting this.
• Add a little noise to outer glows in InDesign. If you added outer glows or drop shadows from within InDesign, they can show up funky on proofs and prints (cutting off before the gradient is complete). I just recently learned from an awesome prepress guy at Tewell Warren that if you add 1–2% noise in the glow controls, you will avoid this. Prepress will usually fix it, but they do miss sometimes and if you can save everybody the trouble and expense of another round of proofs, go for it.
• Work in paragraph and character styles. To avoid heartache at the time of print when you find out that your layouts on different spreads use different leading, work in paragraph and character styles from the beginning. These make consistency at the time of print much easier, and they actually make comping easier too. YES THEY DO. Quit arguing with me.
• Check for typographic niceties (preferably before the client has seen the final proof, so that nothing surprises them on press).
  • Find and replace for double spaces after sentences
  • Correct all phone numbers to dot format (or your/your client’s standard)
  • Make sure all quotes are curly unless they really are inch marks
  • Hunt for em and en dash abuse. This can be done to some extent with InDesign’s automatic features, but it’s not perfect. People do weird things with hyphens and dashes when they send you content, and many of them will be a judgment call that can only be made by someone with a typographic eagle eye.
  • Hunt for hyphen abuse. Some clients have a standard of NO hyphens. Others, usually in high-tech or medical industries where they use lots of long words, just ask that you keep them to a minimum. You can usually do a lot better than the automatic. In tandem with this, you should be able to arrange a nice rag to your paragraphs and avoid widows and orphans at the end of them.
• It’s ALWAYS a good idea to get a second set of eyes. After four years in the business, I am only now getting to the point where I can sleep at night after sending something to print that nobody else checked over. I still like to have someone else in the office look at it if it’s longer than 2 or 4 pages. There are just so many details and for some reason you can’t see them until it’s on press, or worse, stapled and delivered.

Watch for a second installment on what to look for at a press check!

26 Jul 2010, Posted by brittany in Studio News, 3 Comments. Tagged community, denver, design, education, printing, process