Save yourself lots of headaches on your next printing job by contacting the printer you plan to use BEFORE you begin, to get general parameters and advice on what they can and cannot print. Let’s face it, most projects get done just in time, and showing up on your printer’s door step a day later than you said you would, and then asking him or her to rush the job, only to find out that they can’t print on the kind of paper that you want, or the graphics you used are low resolution and need to be replaced, will turn your world upside down when you have promised your client you will have their material to them on time.
Secondly, don’t assume that your monitor is a printing press. Many people have the mentality of “it looks fine on my screen.” In order to run a digital file through the industrial printing process, a digital file has to go through different processes than your office printer, and the software printers use for that process is different than what your office printer uses.
Finally, don’t argue with your printing contact person when they say they need you to supply certain things separately, like fonts and graphics, or graphics at a certain resolution or in a certain format. There is a reason they ask and the attitude of “it looks ok when I hit the print button on my home or office printer” again ignores the fact that a professional printer uses a different process than your office printer.
A good resource book, getting harder to find but still available at places like Amazon, is called Getting It Printed 4th edition by Eric Kenly and Mark Beach. It gives invaluable advice for working with both large run offset jobs and quickprint copy shops (also called service bureaus).
