DIY design tips

Does this describe your situation?

1. You don't know of a professional graphic designer you can afford and whom you can trust to produce something you like.
2. You don't like working with the pressure of an hourly rate.
3. You just want to design it yourself; that way, you know it will be representative of your creative personality, rather than someone else's.
4. You don't have a lot of money to play with, but you have access to a computer with some design tools.

In conflict we have two harsh realities:

1. If you've never done this before, you're not going to get it perfect the first time.
2. Getting something to look the way you want it to on screen is not enough.  The printed piece may look radically different from what you expect.

Here are two ways to resolve the conflict:

1. Start the job yourself but hire a technically competent professional to finish it off.
2. "DIY or die, baby!"

I recommend the first option.  If you're with me, read on.

Cost Effective Collaboration with Professional Prepress

You know you're going to hand off the job to someone else to finish, and that they're going to have to do a little clean up work. How can you minimize the mess? How can you get the best quality?  How can you avoid having to redo work yourself? How can you spend as little money as possible?

Many technical design problems can be repaired at the prepress stage.  However, there are some problems that are not fixable, so you need to make sure that you avoid them. Most "job-killer" flaws have to do with images that are prepared in Photoshop, also known as "raster" images.  Many of these issues are dealt with on other pages of this site; consider this a priority list for which issues you need to get a grip on first.

• Effective Resolution - If your files have insufficient effective resolution, they're going to look pixelated.
• Measurements - Make sure that you get the proportions right.  Don't guess; consult specs instead. Traycards are not square!
• Bleeds - We can often create bleeds, but it can be a little time consuming.  Better if you create them.
• Safety margins - don't get too close to the edge! Keep type and critical images at least 1/8" away from all crop lines.
• Typesetting in Photoshop - Photoshop is not a good program for type, especially small type. Avoid unless you absolutely need to apply Photoshop specific type effects.  Typesetting should be done in page layout software, such as Quark Xpress.
• Save working copies - sometimes, having Photoshop files with the layers still separated can make the difference between an easy fix and total nightmare.

To reiterate, this is not a comprehensive list. There are myriad mistakes that it's possible to make; these suggestions simply address the ones that cripple the most beginners most heavily, most often.

I don't have Quark.  What do I do?

There are two ways to proceed:

1. Supply us with individual pieces and have us do the final assembly
2. Do the entire layout yourself as best you can in whatever program you have

One would think that doing the entire layout yourself would save time, but such is rarely the case.  It's difficult and time consuming to modify layouts that are done entirely in either Photoshop or Illustrator.  Essentially, you're purchasing our Prepress services, but supplying files in an inefficient, cumbersome format.  In terms of billing, it's roughly a wash between having us do the assembly and having us fix files that are really hard to fix. Not only that, but the quality of the final printed product usually suffers - especially for layouts done entirely in Photoshop. Therefore, we advocate supplying us with parts.

Part 1: Layout phase

• Type in all your text into a common word processor such as Microsoft Word or Simpletext. That way, we can import the copy from your files into our templates, saving the time it would take us to type it in.  We'll do the final typesetting in the appropriate page layout software.
• For raster images, bring us 2 copies: the flattened composite, and the original in layers.
• If you're working in Photoshop, and you want to place type, make sure that you have originals with the unrendered type layers preserved.  Typically, we'll prepare two copies; one with text and one without. We import the one with the text into our templates, duplicate your typesetting, and swap out the images so that the one without text replaces the one that was in there.
• If you're working in Illustrator, go ahead and do the whole layout... BUT, be prepared to disassemble it.  In most cases, what we do is remove any raster images from the file, and save the file, minus those images, as a nice, efficient EPS. We'll then place the raster images in our templates, and place the EPS file containing the text and Illustrator elements on top. Make sure that you have free standing copies of any raster images that you've used! Troubleshooting, trapping, and printing seps from this kind of layout, although a little awkward, is usually pretty quick and yields a high quality product.

Part 2: Proofing phase

Once we've swept through the layout process, the proofing process can be tackled.  We'll print out a low-res mockup first, and drop it into a jewel case.  A nicer digital color proof of some sort usually follows. Once you have approved the proof, we print out laser separations, and send the files for film output. 

Since there are few esthetic decisions to be made, the assembly can be fairly streamlined - on average, about a third of the billable hours it would take us to design it ourselves from scratch. Many of our clients have left happy having used this strategy.