Read over on PrintWeek an interesting development in the area of “preflighting,” which will be shown in May at IPEX 2010 in the UK. Interesting, for we have been saying for years just demanding a PDF file in a certain flavor does not work:
Barney Cox, printweek.com, 09 March 2010 Enfocus has launched PitStop Connect – a software tool that printers can supply to clients to ensure files are produced to their specification so that there are “no more headaches” for creatives.
Source: http://www.printweek.com/PreMediaWeekly
The reason it is even more interesting, is for the fact that preflighting does not start with checking a PDF! No, it starts with checking native artwork and Quark, InDesign or Illustrator layouts. That is what FlightCheck Professional and it’s exportable Ground Controls or preflight profiles offer. The ability to share what to check for, BEFORE a PDF is created. The fact that just jamming a PDF spec down the throats of the designers has not worked, as you’ll read in the article, also does not surprise me, for we have been seeing and saying that all along! We read in part: Read more...(500 words, 4 images, estimated 2:00 mins reading time)
Here was a great one we picked up on over at Posterous and their fine assortment of designer orientated blogs. This inspiring video is titled, “The making of a book cover [time-lapse video]” and was posted by AllTop a Guy Kawasaki venture, among ventures. Too bad many graphic designers push preflighting their Illustrations and InDesign layouts to the next party, as in the print-shop. I wouldn’t trust anyone to mess with this after that design was exported… Amazing work here:
Need to preflight or convert to or from Adobe InDesign, then Markzware is your source to free your content. Adobe InDesign Plug-ins and world-class applications that have been with InDesign and DTP every step of the way… Markzware.
We all know what most say is the worlds oldest profession, but I start to wonder if we are not part of what amounts to mankind’s oldest trade – the art of graphic representation!
“COULD these lines etched into 60,000-year-old ostrich eggshells (see photo) be the earliest signs of humans using graphic art to communicate?”
Source: New Scientist
Looks like they tried to use a grid layout to help their typography, but surely not with Adobe InDesign CS4 or similar. Also, being Friday and all, could not resist inserting this cartoon image of a “graphic novel” by a caveman as well:
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What is the difference between a Print Service Provider and a Communications Consultant? One, generally speaking, only prints ink on paper and the other provides a full range of Internet services to offer other avenues of output for ones print content; marketing pieces, publications and art-work of all sorts. The term consultant means, “a person who gives professional or expert advice [source]” thus time perhaps for more and more printers to get into marketing and especially Internet marketing, which is just another form of output, with all the workflow snags and thus opportunities.
There was an interesting piece over on Print CEO which touched on a new campaign trying to pump up print the America. The author was quite upset that they missed the mark with their adverts, waving the old, traditional print flag. When they could have, should have, put their arm around the WWW. Here was part of my comment there:
“Print needs to embrace the Internet and all the communication possibilities it can offer.”Read more...(292 words, estimated 1:10 mins reading time)
“Global Print Monitor” is an interesting site, acting not only as an news aggregator, which communication consultants, prepress, CSR’s (Print Customer Service Representatives) and printing executives should check out, if not daily at least today, but is much more. This resource is also providing in-depth editorials, blog posts and white papers on technology which directly effects our print workflows and bottom-line:
Founded in part by Juan Diaz, former editor in chief from Pressgraph and Tim Coldwell from Tecsa, founder and ex-CEO from Xenotron, the site had this to say to me:
“As print changes and evolves so do trade magazines. Global Print Monitor is a new kind of trade magazine striving to help printers evolve from the traditional definition of print as “ink on paper” towards a new future-oriented “communication service provider” concept. Printers and print service providers nowadays cannot be defined as pure printers anymore. Print and its processes, services as well as results and output are part of the huge communication portfolio that marketers and brands require. Print cannot be seen as a single industry anymore. In turn this affects printers as they are seen as communication consultants by their clients. Read more...(327 words, 1 image, estimated 1:18 mins reading time)
Display, Image Pro, Photolab are indeed all early pre-release product names for a very popular software application which literally, along with Desktop Publishing, helped change our world. Watch the funny way product names (Imaginator anyone?) were chosen and quickly abandoned 20 years ago:
Yes, in case you do not have time to watch the video, which is very nice, that product became better know as Adobe Photoshop…
“The founders of Adobe Photoshop – John Knoll, Thomas Knoll, Russell Brown, and Steve Guttman – tell the story of how an amazing coincidence of circumstances, that came together at just the right time 20 years ago, spawned a cultural paradigm shift unparalleled in our lifetime.” See: http://tv.adobe.com/go/photoshop-20th-anniversary
John Knoll, co-founder of this image processing tool, thought that Photoshop would be best bundled as a file format translation utility in the early days! Very interesting. (source)
