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.

What is the first rule of economics? Supply and demand. The economic slowdown (I hate to say crash, I’ll leave that to the historians to decide) has affected printers, big time. Printers all over the country are shinning their spotlights, searching for hope, any hope, that this will soon be over. There are rumors of printers giving up, quitting, closing their doors, and walking away. There is gossip spreading about presses being repossessed.

Prices are being reduced to entice people to print, and often those bids are so low  there isn’t any profit. It is reasoned that it is better to keep, or get, the press running than to make payments on a piece of iron that is generating Nada, zilch, bupkis. We have an overabundance of supply and a sharply reduced demand. It’s good for the buyer, but is a killer for the printer.

hoarding assets

It makes sense. When companies are in the midst of trying to figure out how to weather the storm, they  hoard their assets. What’s more important after all, printing a new brochure, or keeping your core employees, so that when the situation improves you still have a company left? Tough decisions.

steer into the slide

Everyone in advertising and marketing is shouting as loudly as they can that it pays to advertise during a recession. Companies, they say, who keep their names in front of the public come out of recessions even stronger. That does make sense, logically that is. It is exactly what you are taught  in driver’s education, if you find that the car (the economy) is sliding, steer your car into the slide. Our natural  instinct tells us otherwise, but steering into the slide is the only way to stop it, other than wrecking it.

The problem with recessions is that they are fear based. Emotions trump logic in this case. You’ve all heard the stories of people using worthless stock certificates to paper their walls and discovered decades later that the worthless stock was now a goldmine.  How many potential millionaires tossed away their stock fortunes because of emotions?

feeding emotion

The downward slide we are in, is fed by emotion. Who would buy a new car when they don’t know if they will keep their jobs? Or if they keep their job will they have to agree to pay cuts? Who will buy a new home, go out to a nice restaurant, or invest in a struggling company?

high hopes and low expectations

I have high hopes and low expectations of the new American president. May his infectious smile reassure us that we can pull out of this nose dive. May we learn to sneer at the doomsayers, and laugh in the face of negative press. I’m doing what I can. I’m spreading the word to a larger audience about Bill Ruesch Print Broker, and hoping to infuse my company with new customers. In the meantime, we’ve cut our expenses to the bone, hedged our retirment money, and are doing our best to remember to steer into the slide.

I’m not just talking through my hat. I have to evaluate printers on a daily basis. Part of the job of being a printing broker is to access the capabilities, the pricing, and the attitudes of printers. Because of the differences from shop to shop, the task can be daunting to someone outside of mainstream printing. Many people suspect that there are differences between printers, but even if you take them to the shop and show them around they won’t fully understand what those differences are. Unfortunately there is no pat answer. The honest truth is, choosing the right printer for your job isn’t easy. The honest answer to the question, “Which printer is best for my job? Is–it depends.”

What does it depend on? Well, it depends on what you are trying to do. It’s a little like asking which screwdriver in a box of tools is best. It depends on whether the screw is a Phillips head or slot. It depends on how much maneuvering space you have. If you have six inches of space, a twelve inch screw driver won’t do the job, so if you are printing a 25 1/2″ long brochure it won’t fit on a press with a maximum image size of 17″. That’s a no-brainer isn’t it? What if you have a full-color (cymk) postcard and your regular printer that does your office forms only has one or two color presses? What do you do? In my experience most people will follow the line of least resistance. If you have a relationship with a particular printer and they are not equipped to efficiently produce your job, you might find yourself giving it to them anyway and unbeknownst to you, they do what I do, and broker the job to another company.

If they do what you do, is that a problem? It could be. First of all, most printers have much higher markups on buy-outs than I do. Thirty-five to forty percent is normal. I get between ten to fifteen percent. Second, if you don’t know that they are sending the job out, you probably won’t have an opportunity to do a press check. Press checks are rarely necessary on one or two color work, but on four-color that’s a different story. Most full-color printing is used on sales materials. It is the stuff your customers see. Don’t you want to make sure you are putting your best foot forward if that printed piece is representing you? Of course you do. When you go to a press check you get one last chance to see the job before it is finished. I can’t tell you how many times a customer found a deadly flaw that had passed through all the proofs and wasn’t spotted until the press check. One example comes to mind where the company’s phone number was wrong. This was a ten-thousand dollar printing job and without a press check the customer wouldn’t have seen their error until it was finished. Yikes!

If you liked this information please let me know and I’ll give you other tips on choosing the right printer in future blogs.