The last few blogs I’ve posted have been stressing the importance giving the printer correct specifications so that your returning bids will be accurate. If you do that, and do it perfectly, will that prevent errors? No. Ask any printer you know or any that you don’t know for that matter if Murphy was a printer and you’ll hear a resounding, “Yes” or maybe an emphatic, “Hell, Yes.” For those readers who may not know Murphy’s Law, it goes like this, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” What does that mean? I’ll tell you, it means that no matter how perfectly you plan a print job, and how thoroughly you execute that plan, in the end there’s a chance that a boogie will jump out and ruin the whole darn thing.

So many steps, no wonder someone trips.

Why does Murphy pick on printers? That’s a good question that I think can be answered very simply by the complexity, and number of steps it takes to get something printed. For example I once worked on a company’s brochure. They, the company, hired a graphic designer who hired a photographer to take shots of the workplace. The pictures were professionally done, and the graphic designer did an excellent job in preparing the art. This was before computer design programs when art was furnished to the printer on art boards, so the first step in the process was to shoot the art on our stat camera, and send the photos out to be drum scanned. State of the art stuff for the day. When the prepress people, who were called in the industry (don’t laugh) strippers, got the camera’s film and the film from the separator they had to strip it all together.  This required a different set of negatives for each color. Which were carefully taken over to a plate burner where the negatives were placed precisely over a printing plate and the images photographically etched onto the plate. Then the plate had to be developed. I could go on and on, but I’ve probably already put you to sleep so I’ll stop here.

miscommunications happen

Did you count the steps it took just to get a plate made, and the number of places where something could go wrong? The first possible communication error was between the customer and the graphic designer, the second between the photographer and the designer, and the third between me (the sales rep) and the designer. Another possible point of error is between the printer’s sales person and the estimator. Do you see where I’m going with this? If the job is miscommunicated up front, in any way, there isn’t anything you can do in the production to make it right. I often hear customers say, I don’t need a proof, just go on with the job. I understand, they are busy and don’t need any more to-do’s in their day, but proofs, and specs, and everything else we do to communicate the job are as necessary to the job performance as getting the art in the first place.

Ruined because of what?

Back to the brochure, after all those steps and I didn’t even enumerate what could go wrong on press, in the bindery, or even with delivery, after the job was delivered I got a phone call from the president of the company. He said, “This is a terrible brochure. You ruined what was supposed to be a showpiece for our company.”

I had samples on my desk and for the life of me couldn’t understand why he would be so upset. It was a beautiful piece. So I asked, “What exactly is the problem?”

He told me that his secretary’s dress came out too aqua it was really more of a royal blue color. I swear this is a true story! Her dress was the wrong shade of blue, are you kidding me? Assuming there was a real problem, where could it have taken a wrong turn? First if shot under fluorescent lights unless they are color corrected everything will be tinged with yellow. The color separator could have been adjusting for pleasing flesh tones and tweaked it a little off color. Printing is done with dots as I mentioned in an earlier blog (Sunday, February 15th, 2009), those dots are made with four pigments, CYMK. Not every color can be perfectly reproduced with those colors. Finally on press, the ink flow to the sheet is adjusted by the press operator to get the best result. Where did it go wrong-anywhere, nowhere.  The real question was did the brochure fulfill it’s purpose? Was it professionally produced in an accepted workmanlike manner? Yes and yes. Did any potential customer refuse to buy his product because of the color of the secretary’s dress? I don’t think so. His reaction was a bit over the top don’t you think? I wonder what was really going on?

He was

But again, Murphy was a printer. I swear that he was.

buggy-whip changes

I stirred up a lot of comment with  my blog Steering into the Slide. I really appreciate my new friends with LinkedIn opining on the issue. Most responses favored my never-say-die attitude, but a few expressed concern that it would never be the same again in the printing world. I have to ask myself, “When has anything ever remained the same?” The printing industry is being confronted with what I call buggy-whip changes. You know, with the advent of the automobile, buggy whip manufacturers went out of business. We are facing a catch-up or get-out world. The problem is knowing which way the wind is blowing. The best guessers win. The worst lose.

reverse progress

We in the business have all seen change coming. We’ve been watching it for a  long time. Sometimes technological change happens too fast despite our best efforts to prepare for it. I’m thinking now about the latest generation of co-processors. I read that the computers are not currently developed to the stage where they can take full advantage of the chips and installing them could actually hamper performance by slowing it down. Isn’t that a kick in the head? We are so used to the next annual upgrade that we never suspected we could go backward. How long will this be a problem? Well that is the beauty of it, it won’t take long. In fact, I read that article a couple of months ago and in techie-time that’s like twenty years or so. The problem may already be fixed.

printer-time, techie-time

Printer-time goes much slower than techie-time. Printers who have millions of dollars tied up in equipment can’t turn around that fast.

he died

I toured a large plant in Denver, Colorado a few years ago. As I was being shown the shop we passed large area that was jammed with old letterpress equipment. They must have had thirty non-operational, dusty, cobwebbed presses and Linotype’s just sitting there. I asked about it and was told in an offhanded way, “Oh that junk? The man who operated it died.”

“Don’t you have anyone else to run it?” I wanted to know.

He said, “No one wanted to learn.”

I felt a little sad to see the memorial to this man’s life rusting on the floor and I knew that it was just a matter of time before it became scrap. On the other hand, the man had probably spent his entire life operating that equipment, or something just like it. Press operators now have no such assurance of a lifetime of work. The skills they’ve worked so hard to perfect could become useless in the new printing reality. They can be the best in the business, top-of-the-heap right now and in a relative blink of an eye their services may no longer be needed, they’d be buggy-whipped into oblivion. No one wants to see that happen, but how do you stop the technological juggernaut? You can’t. Change is coming and no one can stop it and honestly why would anyone want to?

chill

The whole industry needs yoga classes to calm us, and teach us flexibility. Breathe in the prana you printers. We’ll find a way together. We’ll all find the way together.

I’m not just talking through my hat here. Today I can’t help but remember what the print world was like when I was green.  I was eighteen, it was the summer of 1968 and I was working for Hi-Color Lithographers, a newspaper printer in Tucson, Arizona. I was hired as a fly boy and a year later became an assistant pressman. A fly boy’s job was to stand at the end of the press, scoop up newspapers  as they came off the delivery, rush over to the string bundler, step on the pedal and backup quickly to prevent fingers getting tied up with the newspapers. I learned this lesson the painful way. I then had to take the packages over to a pallet and stack them so they wouldn’t fall over when the pallet jack moved it. That accomplished, I had to rush back to the delivery end of the press and scoop up another load before they all dumped on the floor. I did this all day long. Boring, boring, boring.

When the press ran low on paper I had to go over to the area where we stored the half-ton rolls and roll them toward the press. I was taught how to jackass a turn by running the roll up on a quarter inch thick, approximately one foot square of plywood. This allowed the roll to pivot. Otherwise it would take six men to turn the roll.

Once I aligned the roll of paper with the press, I had to knock out the wooden chucks that keep the cardboard core from collapsing.  I had to muscle a heavy iron shaft, run it through the core, and tighten metal core cuffs to prevent the roll from slipping on press. Then came my favorite part. I got to push the button to move the hoist over to the shafted roll. After securing the hooks to the shaft, the hoist was employed again to lift the roll onto the press. I had to make sure that it fit in it’s grooves, and ta-da, we were ready to keep printing.

Needless to say, this kind of manual labor has largely been replaced with automated systems. I doubt that any web printer uses plywood pivots any more. Instead they have modified fork lifts that grab the rolls around the middle with curved arms to haul them to the press.

I’m not sure why I wrote this today. Maybe the rain outside my office window is making me feel nostalgic.