If you are just starting to think about the printing process for new business cards or company letterhead than you may not yet have heard of prepress, if you are a designer you might dread the idea of someone pointing out problems with your work. Either way, prepress is one of the, if not the single, most important parts of getting anything printed.
Obviously, the name tells us something – prepress being things that happen before a project makes it onto the press. But what does it really entail?
Back in the old days – that weren’t really too long ago– prepress involved a number of highly skilled crafts people taking the work from a designer and preparing everything to go on press. This meant everything from melting lead to set the type for printing to manually creating color separations from an image. Not to mention the teams of people it took to retouch a photo. All of this happening away from the hands and eyes of the designer.
Then the computer came and with it the creative suite products we all know and love – and everything changed. Now all those time-consuming tasks are concentrated into a few computer programs that help simplify the entire process and put all of the power into the hands of the designers.
If there were one simple definition of prepress it would be that prepress is design.
Its everything that happens from the initial idea, right up until your project starts running on a press. Prepress is no longer about all the bland preparation of a file , it really is about designing, concept creation and ensuring things are going to look the way you want them.
I have often heard it said that 9 out of 10 problems with a job on press, are not problems from the press, but problems with prepress. Somewhere, someone made a mistake, missed something, or just didn’t realize there was a problem. All of that comes back to the prepress department, whether it is a lone designer preparing the file for print, or a team of people working for a printer.
So what do you need to know to ensure that your prepress runs smoothly? That is the thousand-print answer if ever there was one, and unfortunately, there is no easy answer. Just as every job is different, the needs and nature of prepress needs to be different too.
But if there were one thought to consider that could help define your approach to prepress as you work on a project it might be this:
Focus on production. Initial concepts require an open and creative outlook, but at a certain point (the point of prepress) you need to start thinking about how to produce something and make it real. One moves from a wide open, anything-goes creativity to a focused creativity that seeks to make an idea a tangible and printable piece.
Of course that is just the beginning. We’ll be delving in to a lot of related topics in the coming weeks here at cutpasteandprint, so stay tuned. And always if you have a question or a comment, feel free to ask below.
