Quoted in Folio! WooHoo!

clipped from www.foliomag.com <http://www.foliomag.com/2009/state-publication...

Yes, it's a little self-aggrandizing, but I seldom see my name printed outside of a police blotter, so I appreciate the (temporary) validation it offers.

About half-way through the (quite long) article:

Meanwhile, Rodale’s Women’s Health works with QuadGraphics and a process called Smart Create. “We print to a print server or export a PDF with a low res image,” says production manager David Cardillo. “It eliminates all pre-press people. Some have argued that it puts the onus of pre-press on us, but I’m making sure my file is okay before shipping. I’ve had issues with people trying to fix things they thought were wrong in the layout. This has eliminated that. It’s also much faster; we usually get a page proof the next day.”

Then, nicely, I finish the article:

“I recently saw an article about paper manufacturers adding more calcium to the mixture for whiter sheets, and now that’s affecting the press by putting more sediment in the ink and it’s getting into the plates and rollers,” says Cardillo. “Even the pressman isn’t sure. Once they think they’ve got it, someone else throws something into the mix. Yes, it’s the same brand of paper but it’s got a different composition and it hits the paper differently so they have to readjust everything.” Don’t dismiss Cardillo as just another legacy print publisher who’s afraid of change. “My big thing about any technology is that it does make some things easier but they all come with their own set of problems,” he says. “I’ve got a decade of experience in IT and I say digital is not the answer. It’s faster but not necessarily better. Ultimately, this is still a 400-year-old technology. Maybe it requires a 400-year-old process to get it right.”

The point of the matter is, technology is not the silver bullet people like to think it is. Around here, people have been jonesing for some time for K4, to the point that it's become some pie-in-the-sky, all-I-want-for-Xmas kind of wish. ("All I want is peace in the middle east, and K4 on my desktop.") While I do think a K4 workflow would alleviate some of the difficulties we endure, it's not the penultimate solution. There are several low-overhead, lo-tech, off-the-shelf (i.e. cheap) solutions on the market that would at least make my day easier.

I was working on the other side of the monitor when Martha Stewart implemented a QPS workflow. Few people outside of IT appreciate the tremendous up-front, back-end work that goes into that development. Using that workflow, and K4 briefly at Hearst, I could tell you (as could anyone in Production) about all the hoops to jump through to get it to work properly. It's a tremendous boon to the workflow, but it's hardly less work.

And then there's soft proofing. Ugh. Don't we have a hard enough time trying to match ink on paper to different ink on different paper without trying to digitally approximate what might come out of a proofer to match on press? Color is subjective enough, and then we're trying to make sure every monitor on every desk in every location (under every different lighting condition) is representing the same colors. Walk into a television retailer, one where the same program is on 12 different screens. The joke in the video post world is NTSC stands for Never The Same Color.

Maybe it is easier than that. Maybe by removing a step - getting a page proof to accurately represent what's achievable on press - you're getting a clearer indication of what your end product is going to be. If you can show me, digitally, what my dot pattern and screen angle are going to look like, maybe I could put up with recalibrating my screen when I come in every morning. Just make sure I can see those subtle shades of green in my flesh, and where my reds are going to flare up in my shadows.