If you deliver print ready artwork to your printing company…
Then you will get charged a significant premium…

Your printer needs this premium to allow for the amount of work they have to perform on almost every customer delivered job just to get it back to the condition it was in before it left your computer. The problem for the printer is that they can’t and don’t charge anywhere near enough to fix these problems. So it’s losses all around, you pay too much, the printer doesn’t cover their costs and nobody wins as the money is just thrown into a continually self perpetuating pit of problems.

It’s not your fault – or your printer’s, but customer delivered artwork is responsible for introducing more errors into the printing process than all the other parts of the process combined.

This has nothing to do with your skill level – or your printer’s, your computer, operating system or Desktop Publishing Software preferences, but this one issue has added a huge overhead to the printing industry and contributes to the cost of every printing job. One American study has shown that 78% of jobs with customer delivered artwork need substantial work at the production end to make them print ready.

Heidelberg, the Rolls Royce of printing press manufacturers, has described the problem in this way.

When a customer is preparing artwork for print it is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together, when the puzzle is complete it is time to send it to the printer. The problem is that the methods used to deliver the artwork to the printer are the equivalent of pulling the jigsaw puzzle apart and leaving the printer to put it back together again – which wouldn’t be so bad if some of the pieces didn’t get broken, lost or change shape, colour and/or size on the way.

For example;

One regular job for a printing company is a poster sized wall planner that is covered in advertisements. Each ad is virtually a mini prepress job in itself. Every quarter this job arrives and would typically take two experienced prepress staff between a day and half to two days each to prepare the file for printing after the customer had delivered “Print Ready Artwork” (Not the customer’s fault).

So the best case scenario is two not inexpensive staff working 12 hours each on this job, even at the loss making rate of $50 an hour there is a $1200 stone tied to the neck of this job. But a printer could never hit a client with a $1200 preparation bill, so the printer absorbs it as an overhead and a little piece of that job and all the other jobs like it get added to the cost of every printing job. With a few notable exceptions this practice is across the entire printing industry.

And this is one of the positive stories, the job is regular, the issues a known quantity, the deadlines not urgent and a good working relationship between the artwork creator and the production staff.

For every positive Customer Delivered Artwork story there are four bad ones, with the following laws applying;

• The simpler the job appears when the printer is quoting it the more likely there is to be some tiny but crucial and unfathomable problem within the artwork
• The likelihood of there being a time sapping niggly problem with the artwork is in direct proportion to the urgency of the job.

This is still the good news, this assumes that all the problems get discovered and fixed in prepress. But by sheer weight of numbers some problems don’t get noticed straightaway, they slip through the cracks and go deeper into the production process with the cost of fixing them rising dramatically with every step. Sometimes it is too late, the job is printed and distributed before the problem is discovered and the printer, designer and customer take their partners for the red-faced “It’s your fault!” dance.

As previously said, it isn’t anybody’s fault as such, the normal methods of customer delivered artwork were the only way available for a long time, so long that many industry people have just accepted that that is how it is, but there is too much money being wasted to let this problem go unchecked.

The simple answer to this problem is to create and deliver a PDF suitable for high resolution printing. But not everybody has Acrobat or is willing to fork out the $400+ to get it. So then people try to source cheap or free PDF engines from the internet that frankly just aren’t up to scratch for high quality work.

Even if the customer has Acrobat, although creating a PDF is simple, creating a PDF that will reproduce faithfully on high resolution printing equipment is not. The industry statistics are that four out of ten customer delivered PDFs are suitable, six are not. This is nothing to do with the capability of PDF to reproduce the highest of quality print jobs; it is about the huge number of variables when creating a PDF that trip people over.

Compounding the problem is the latest generation of Desktop Publishing Software that is able to create a PDF version that is so new that the current generation of RIPs (Raster Image Processor: The Printer uses a RIP to convert your artwork into the final format that ultimately controls the imaging of the printing plate) are unable to print.

So, frustrated by the shortcomings of customer delivered PDFs, many turn back to the familiar “Bad old way” or to put it another way “Last Century’s Workflow”.

Thankfully advances in PDF and Internet technology have delivered a solution to all these problems and some unexpected side benefits as well.

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