Nineteen years ago I took my first job as a designer. The year was 1990 and when I came in for my first day of work we took delivery of two shinny new Mac II fx computers. I still remember the cover of Macworld magazine displaying two F14 jets with the headline, “The Fastest Macs Ever.” Quark was version 1.x and we had hot wax machines on every light table. The studio manager/owner was a freak about typography and we meticulously created kerning pairs for every font we owned. For fun we would give each other font recognition tests. On a daily basis we begged to turn off the Compugraphic and say goodbye to setting galleys of type and layout pages completely on the Mac. For the first year, all we did was set the copy and leave holes for photos to be stripped in. We created very clean art boards that were sent to our local printer. That was the last we saw of the project until it was done. It was almost another year before we started outputting film and any graphics. We were on the bleeding edge. Running curve calibrations daily and pushing the printers to use our film. The agency gave me my start with the Mac and for that I’m very grateful.
From there I went to work for a prepress house and was introduced to Scitex. How cool it was to build complete pages, output color-separated film complete with traps in imposed flats. A 16-page letter sized book might of taken two plus days to complete. Typical rates for the work were $300.00 an hour. A Scitex workstation that could process both color corrections and assemble pages ran well over $300,000.00. We were bursting at the seams with work and there were no arguments about cost or the time it took to complete the job. Clients would wait days to see proofs and there were very few alterations. Color was looked at and approved prior to final pages being submitted. Agencies were paid for their design and film houses and printers for everything they did.
Since that time personal desktop computers have continued to evolve, office secretaries have become designers and the art of typography has all but vanished. Agencies have carved their niche and remain vital to successful campaigns and collateral. There are only a handful of separation houses, which have either successfully maintained clients through data management or have been swallowed whole by wide-eyed printers who saw an opportunity to capitalize on another revenue stream. Increasing the work on their high priced production presses. I had a choice to make. Do I go back to the design side or join a print shop that realizes the value of prepress? I choose the later and took my knowledge of production and design to a startup printer in need of my skills. I quickly created efficient systems for production and worked daily with the agencies that were creating files. Automatic Picture Replacement (APR) was the Scitex version of OPI and we worked with our customers to utilize PSImages to allow for automated swap out of images. It was a big deal. No desktop computer could handle working with high res files and we needed a way to speed up production processes and push work through the shop. Overtime was a given and people worked routine 60-70 hour weeks. A few years into that job we purchased two Macintosh Quadra 900’s and started using Photoshop for color correction. Each machine was equipped with a whopping 256 meg of ram and with all the software and Barco Monitors cost $32,000.00. It would only be a few more years and the work would begin to slow.
Technology continued to change for the next several years and computer systems and software began putting more and more control into the hands of the designer. We saw a huge decrease in the quality of the work. Color consistency and printability was and still is a huge issue. Digital photography has made everyone his or her own photographer. To be competitive sales people had to start promising anything they could to get the job. The profits of commercial printers started to decline and the work became a commodity. There needed to be a reason someone would be awarded the print. The days of quality work have been swept aside and it became a culture of delivering proofs the next day.
As you can see, I have seen quite a change in an industry that today still continues to change. I began to ask myself what the next change was going to be and I looked deep into my experiences and decided it was the right time to leave the production side of print and join the world of sales. Today, technology continues to progress and the ability for designers to build quality files is within reach. Automation available in today’s prepress systems has put tools into the clients’ hands that have never been available. Savvy clients will adopt these technologies and as a result control their costs and budgets and increase profits for their firms. Printers will be forced to provide these technologies to win work and fill their capacity. So the question becomes who will deliver these technologies and provide the necessary training to take full advantage of them. Add-on the ability to intelligently discuss web-to-print technology, targeted marketing, and print on demand and the answer has to be someone who has been involved in the production of it and is a not only your sales representative but your go to person. Someone who will give you the answers they can and if they can’t get them for you and then teach you what to do next.
Our economic environment has created difficulty for all of us. Those who succeed will need to reinvent what they do and deliver new products and services. I for one will be on that side of the equation. Why not join me?
No comments:
Post a Comment