Here is an interesting piece from Dr. Joe of WhatTheyThink.com titled, “June 10 Economic Webinar Q&A.” This bit on the average number of employees at a printer and it’s potential relation to graphic designers taking on more of the role of prepress is what I wanted us to zoom in on here:

Q.  Is the average size of successful printing companies increasing or decreasing? Sales volume and or employee count as a measure.

A. Sales are down and our industry has a habit of calibrating itself by adding or shedding businesses as needed. The inflation-adjusted sales per employee is actually remarkably steady, which indicates this. The average size of a commercial printing business has been on a very slow decline for decades. It was around 26 employees in the late 1980s and was just above 19 by 2006. That says more about desktop publishing replacing prepress than it says about anything else.
Source: http://members.whattheythink.com/home/drjoe269.cfm  Read more... (460 words, estimated 1:50 mins reading time)

Yes, you can preflight and package (collect all used fonts and images) your Adobe Illustrator CS3 (CS4 support coming just around the corner, hang tight!) artwork with Markzware’s FlightCheck. Here is a little video demonstration:

Package (and preflight) Adobe Illustrator artwork with FlightCheck

Hi everybody! David Dilling here from Markzware. I want to share with you a question we just got which we’ve been asked before. And It’s a very useful tip, I believe particularly if you’re using Illustrator- Adobe Illustrator files, in this case CS3. The question was, Can I use FlightCheck of course to preflight my Illustrator files but more importantly for this customer – can I package, can I collect all the fonts and images used into one folder. InDesign does this for their customer. Of course, FlightCheck does this stand-alone and compresses the file but Illustrator does not. Can FlightCheck help me? In short, the answer is YES! So, let me show you how that works.  Read more... (901 words, estimated 3:36 mins reading time)