The Changing Face of Graphic Design

For many years, the printing industry has been divided into two separate areas of expertise. There are those who run the presses and take care of “finishing;” i.e. cutting, folding, binding, and so on. Other people supply the jobs to be printed: the graphic designers. Since the early 1980s, the work of graphic designers has evolved from the mechanical assembly of the basic layout, into which the printer’s photographic department placed the relevant images, to the production of digital files that contain absolutely everything needed for the job.

Digitization has been a major development. Yet, while the methods used to produce digital files continue to evolve at high speed, as each successive version of the various software applications is released, the designer and the printer have generally remained within their own traditionally defined areas of expertise. As a result, many of the physical requirements of the printing process are not understood by the very people who need to understand them most of all—the graphic designers.

In the early days of digital production, graphic designers often went through a period of intense anxiety while they waited to see how their work actually looked in print. Colors might have changed, pictures might look miserable compared to how they appeared on screen, and previously unseen mistakes might suddenly make themselves known.

Rather than improving over time, these problems took a serious turn for the worse in the early 2000s. Printers started to request that jobs were submitted to them as a PDF (portable document format) file rather than in the “native” software in which they were created. While this has made life easier for printers, PDF files are hard—sometimes impossible—to edit. Printers often don’t notice unwitting errors, as the nature of PDF files means that these errors are much harder to see in the first place, leaving responsibility for them squarely on the shoulders of the unfortunate designer.

Precise image calibration, dot gain, RGB vs. CMYK, screen clash, and trapping are some of the gray areas encountered by graphic designers in digital prepress. These seemingly complex processes are actually easy to deal with, but they are often not understood, and can lead to problems on the press that are expensive and time-consuming to fix.

Graphic designers who can understand and manage these areas with confidence will save time and money on everything they do. In addition, they will no longer find themselves waking up in a panic at 3 a.m., mentally going over their production process searching for possible errors.