Half a bob off plumb

It’s been one of those weird weeks when the moon should have been full. But it wasn’t. Perhaps the 100 plus degree heat an 99.999997% humidity have steamed the brains of Middle Georgians.  Poor Richard doesn’t know exactly what it is, but things are slightly askew here . . . to paraphrase my buddy Bob Galloway, the curmudgeon, the entire town is about “half a bob off plumb.”

Item One

I didn’t get to meet her, but right hand man Brian said that she looked relatively normal when she walked through the doors of the printshop behind the red awnings on Poplar (name carefully concealed to avoid disrupting the peaceful sleep of the powers that be at the franchise . . . hint, sounds like Gralpharaphics).  She explained to Brian that she was opening a new business and needed letterhead, envelopes, business card, etc. This used to be a fairly common occurrence at printing companies, and Brian looked forward to serving a new customer.

It’s not uncommon that a new customer will ask the price of a product before they provide a description of it.  While it is possible to quote a price that will cover most contingencies, I’ve yet to find a customer who will accept an estimate of “probably somewhat less than $10,000,” without question.  Standard operating procedure is to try to narrow the description a bit and find a solution that is reasonably in line with the customer’s expectations and budget.

Brian attempted and ascertained that the customer would like to use paper for her letterhead and envelopes and would also like her symbol on it.  She specifically said “symbol,” not logo or wordmark or even image. She wanted her symbol on the letterhead . . . in color . . . and (as she glanced and pointed at a presentation folder on our display rack) “smashed into the paper like that.”

Skeptical that the cost of embossing a process color logo on a short run of letterhead would be practical for a new business, Brian started to suggest alternatives. The customer was adamant. What she wanted was her symbol smashed into the letterhead, business cards and envelopes. Ever helpful, Brian offered to run down prices and asked if the customer had her logo as a digital file that we could use . . . or at least something that we could look at to help us prepare the estimate.  The customer fumbled a bit, then reached in her purse, removed her billfold and then her drivers license.

“That’s it,” she exclaimed, pointing at the photo on the license. “That’s my symbol. That’s what I want!”

Brian, ever mindful of the endless time and patience available to the printshop owner, deferred to Poor Richard and told the customer that I would follow up with her.  I haven’t contacted her yet, but I do have an idea. Perhaps something like this might work?

Credit: http://www.freakingnews.com

Item Two

Three paragraphs, bullet points, and numbers. Poor Richard is probably going to get in big trouble with this one, because the customer is going to read this blog, identify himself, and get supremely ticked off!

Here’s the text of the email we received:

Whereas, from time to time revisions are made to documents created for Amalgamated Peanut Butter and Jelly Roll Company (APB&J Rollco), and said documents are printed and archived by Gralpharaphics of Macon, the aforesaid company (APB&J Rollco) wishes to indicate the occurrence of revisions to each document produced and to verify the currency of each revision prior to production of duplications, reprints, or new and unique iterations of each printed version or versions.

Because the temporality of the aforementioned documents is currently not indicated, this may currently counterindicate the currency of our current versions. In fact, our customers have occasionally called the currency of our current versions into question due to the lack of an evidential indicant that the version they received was indeed correct and produced contemporaneously with the latest APB&J Rollco product described within.

Our goals are thus:

• to accurately indicate the current version
• to convey this clearly to our customers
• to assure that the latest iteration of each document is indeed the current version
• (to confuse the pants off of the folks at Gralpharaphics)

To that end we require that your company immediately implement the following changes as pertain to the documents and versions of documents you currently produce, have produced in the past, or might conceivably produce in the future for APB&J Rollco:

1. Indicate the current version on the document
2. Do this in such a way that the temporality of the version is conveyed to each customer
3. Destroy, delete, or otherwise dispense with document versions that are untemporal or not current

Many thanks for the services you render for APB&J Rollco and for your prompt attention to this matter.

–Name withheld in the vain hope that Poor Richard will go undiscovered.

Admittedly, Poor Richard has elaborated a bit . . . but not a lot.  The actual email we received from our good, but very precise, customer was almost as complicated as the gobbledygook inserted above and did require a phone call to ascertain exactly what the customer wanted . . . a date entry at the bottom of each form we produce to indicate the latest revision.

Item Three

The customer was absolutely serious. So serious in fact that he noted a specific instruction on the proof copy that he faxed back to us and on his email approval of the final proof.  We’ve produced shells similar to the one the customer wanted many times. A shell is  boilerplate language (and sometimes a form image) that can be fed through a laser printer to overprint the specifics of a contract, invoice, etc.

In this case, we were asked to print 5000 copies on one side. Presumably the specifics would be printed on the other. There was no specific paper requirement . . . we printed on 60# offset text (no watermarks).

The instruction:  Please make sure that this information is printed on the back of the paper.

I think we did OK. We stacked all 5000 copies printed side down in the boxes and delivered them to the customer.  He thought we were wonderful!

Times are still rough in the printing business, but it laughter is a great diversion. Isn’t life grand?

Opening Pandora’s box

It’s been a while since Poor Richard has written about proofing (see Just Do It . . . I Trust You!). At the printshop behind the red awnings on Poplar Street, we generally follow Poor Richard’s Rule #1: Proof Everything. When we fail to follow Rule #1, it is usually because the owner decides to make an exception, allows one of our customers to convince him that they do not need a proof, and gets totally burned in the process because something goes awry or does not meet the customer’s expectations.

If the CIA was really intelligent, they would store all of their Top Secret, classified, very sensitive documents in the basements of printshops across this great nation. Because we see so much text come past our eyes, printers don’t really read much of it.  At Gralpharaphics (name changed to protect the delicate sensitivity of the franchise), we used to do internal proofs of hard copy prints for much of what went through the shop. We were looking for low resolution graphics and the general composition of each piece ; whether it would fold correctly and if there were font errors.  Today, for much of what we print, preflight software will indicate many of the technical errors and our internal proofing process is focused more on how the piece will finish (through bindery) than the general composition. In short, we don’t read for context and we don’t always catch spelling errors.

The phone call of the month for December was from a customer that had discovered a typo in a brochure we had printed for them . . . in September. In fact, it was an exact repeat of the same job printed for them about a year before.  And that job was a redesign of a file that came to us in .pdf format sometimes shortly after Adobe Acrobat was invented, opening the possibility that the misspelling could potentially be over a decade old.  Naturally, the customer wanted the job reprinted . . . for free.

We checked the proofs. Sure enough, there was the typo buried plain as day right in the middle of a long paragraph in the center panel of the inside of the brochure. It stood out dramatically in 11 point Times New Roman; so evident that the customer missed it totally when they signed off on the proof.

Who has the responsibility? Proofs do place the onus of responsibility for the final appearance and accuracy of each printed piece on the customer. This is customary in the printing trade and spelled out clearly in the proof policy that our shop sends with every proof.  While some customers may see this as a catch, printers consider it a necessity. Even if we could completely check everything we print for absolute accuracy, this would not compensate for the vagaries of syntax, composition or customer taste. There have been many occasions where Poor Richard or one of my associates has corrected grammar or spelling only to have it uncorrected by the customer. Likewise, the design or composition of many of the projects we print may be more pleasing to our customer than to our unrefined tastes.  This really is the critical point for most printers: the project must meet the approval of the customer. The signed proof signifies that it does.

Back to the problem of the month. Another of Poor Richard’s rules that falls pretty near the top of the list (like #2 maybe) is this: Customers are important. These days, they’re also pretty darn hard to come by.  We understood the customer’s problem and offered to help them with the reprint.  Mind you, this is not customary practice among printers. Margins are very tight in our business and printing at cost is spinning the wheels at best and at worst a missed opportunity for profitable use of time and equipment. Nonetheless, customers are important. We offered to make the correction and reprint at a discount.

After the correction was made, the competent Gralpharaphics team followed Poor Richard’s Rule #1 and sent the customer a final proof for approval. At least, we thought that it was final. The proof was returned with a request for another change.  Technically, this request crossed the fine line between correction and revision, but the change requested was minor and we chose not to sweat it. That’s when we opened Pandora’s box. We made the revision and sent another proof.

The proof response came back with a Microsoft Word file attached. We were now well beyond correction and decidedly in the realm of revision.   Poor Richard tried not to reach the conclusion that the customer’s stated need — to correct a typo — might not have been their actual objective. Without questioning the customer’s motives, we explained that the discount had been offered to help with a correction. The scope of the revisions requested had essentially changed the project from a reprint to something like creating a new brochure.  We would have to charge for the additional layout and prepress time incurred for the changes.

There are times when Poor Richard is able to predict the future before it even happens. I could see this spinning out of control even without a crystal ball. The conversation was polite, the customer didn’t really understand, and the project was placed on (permanent) hold.  Chances are that we lost a customer. Bummer. Not good.

Because we’re a small business in a small market, we’ve never had the luxury of dealing only with professional “print buyers;” folks whose expectations are to some extent shaped by their understanding of and interest in the art of printing. We have had the privilege of working with some very nice folks, many of whom wanted to learn a little about print as we produced their projects. I think that there was a general appreciation among our customers of the value of the tangible product we created and of the work that went into it; but now this appreciation may be fading.

The last 18 months of struggle have brought a sea change to the printing industry and to local printers like the shop on Poplar Street.  While we continue to compete with one another for business, we also compete against a host of other choices for communication. Increasingly, our customers’ expectations are molded by the other choices. It’s no problem to correct a typo on a web page. It doesn’t require a reprint. The fact is that we have fewer customers who are interested in print and they are much less willing to deal with the complexities involved.  Price and speed have become more important and many customers are actually less concerned with quality than ever before. To paraphrase Robert Heinlein, “they don’t want it good, they want it Wednesday.”

This presents a real challenge to folks like Poor Richard. The old rules of printing (like proof policies) seem necessary to me. It is important to do things right and because almost all of the projects we produce are essentially custom made, there has to be some understanding between printers and our customers.  We can’t sell labels produced for Jim Bob’s BBQ Sauce to his competitor Billy Bob.  If Jim Bob doesn’t want the labels, they’re trash.

How do we adapt? As our customers become increasingly less patient with the print process, it is tempting to just bend the rules and take our chances.  Waive the proofs, forget the rules, just print it and hope it’s right. Throw Pandora’s box wide open.

If we do that, how long will it take for the snakes inside to bite us?

Just do it . . . I trust you

Just do it . . . I trust you.

These may be words that every adolescent male dreams about, but they strike fear into a printer’s heart.

At the printshop, these words are not cooed softly. Rather, they’re an exasperated exclamation as a harried customer walks out the door.

What the customer thinks he means is, “I’m sure you’ll get it right.”

What the printer hears is, “If I don’t like it, you’ll eat the cost.”

The printing projects we produce at AlphaGraphics are almost always custom. They will work for one customer only. If Joe’s Body Shop doesn’t like his business cards, we can’t sell them to Joe’s Spa and Massage. The businesses may sound similar, but the activities at the two addresses could be completely different. Imagine the dismay of the customer needing car repair who walks into the massage parlor (or vice versa)!

We try not to make too many requirements of our customers. We require proofs. We require that each customer approve a proof before printing takes place.We ask this of our customers even if a job has been done before and the customer says that it is an exact reprint.

“Why?” you ask.

Because printing offers so many wonderful opportunities for mistakes. For instance, we printed envelopes for the Edumacation Department at one of the local universities for several years before it became the Division of Edumacation, an important change for those who were getting edumacated. If we hadn’t proofed the envelopes each time, mail might have been returned to a department that didn’t even exist any more.

On a more serious note, we have had customers who did not thoroughly proof their business cards, received cards with an incorrect phone number, gave out half a box, then wondered why they never received a phone call.

Printers are nowhere near immune from mistakes. Poor Richard’s law #34 states, “the more creative the graphic designer, the more spelling mistakes he/she will make.” I’m convinced that the best designers all type with two left hands and all thumbs. And don’t ask me why spell check is anathema to graphics people. They used to get away with the excuse that it wasn’t built into the page layout programs. That’s not the case anymore. Now I suppose that misspelling has become a part of artistic license. Anyway, designers won’t use spell check.

At AlphaGraphics, we do internal proofs. If there’s a lot of text involved, we ask Joe to do the proof. Joe went to school in the ’50s and ’60s when they still taught people to punctuate and spell. Most of our internal proofs are checked more for form, flow and position than for content, though.

We’ve also gotten stung quite a few times. We’ve frequently corrected spelling, punctuation and occasionally syntax in text that a customer has provided only to have them uncorrect it at proof. In these cases, the customer is right; even if the necklace they are describing is not made of eggs (hint: it’s an amulet, not an omelet).

It’s really pretty simple. There are just too many jobs coming through the shop to catch everything. That’s why it’s important for each customer to receive, carefully inspect, and approve a proof. We appreciate your trust, but we’re careful. You still get a proof.

Ben’s Reconstituted Printshop

I’ve been off for a week . . . not psychologically, but physically.

My daughter and I went to Pennsylvania to visit colleges. She’s going next year, I just wanted to revisit my young adulthood.

Anyway . . . we visited University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and had a day to kill, so we did the tourist thing. We saw Independance Hall, the Liberty Bell, and the entire 8 block area where almost all of the history of the entire United States of America took place.

After the fact, I’m convinced that the most important change in the last 230 years is the advent of security equipment. We had to go through a lot of it. Button Gwinnett would have never made it . . . the brass on his waistcoat would have set off the alarm system. The wisdom of screening Amish visitors for shoe bombs is a story for another day, though. What I really want to write about today is Ben Franklin’s printshop.

We visited Franklin Courtyard, which is where Ben built his house. Actually, Ben’s wife built the house, because Ben was kicking up his heels in France. There wasn’t much left of the original except the hole for Ben’s outhouse. It seems that Ben’s grandkids were more interested in real estate than statesmanship, publishing or inventing. Land values had increased near the waterfront, so they ripped down Ben’s famous house and built condominiums, or the 19th century equivalent thereof. So, there’s really very little of the original Franklin there.

The house must have been pretty fantastic for the time. It had indoor plumbing of sorts and a unique ventilation system that Ben designed to draw air and steam out of the kitchen. None of this can be seen, it’s all been torn down. All that’s left is the holes for the privy, and those have been completely scoured by archaeological types.

There is a great reconstituted printshop, though, put together with equipment that was kind of current for the period. They’ve even built a facsimile of Ben’s letterpress. The press is new, but according to the pressman, the wood used to build it is 200 years old. I’m still digesting the importance of this singular fact.

The pressman, who is a certified United States Park Ranger (and thus exempt from getting his shoes screened), was producing unauthorized copies of Poor Richard’s Almanack on the press at an astounding speed of about one sheet every 10 minutes. He claimed that he could achieve a speed of 3 sheets/minute, but we did not observe this degree of productivity. In fact, he seemed much more interested in talking with the tourists than getting the daily production out.

I was fascinated. Even assuming a snail’s pace for production (180 sheets/hour compared to 10M on a good press), it was obvious what a massive technological breakthrough the printing press must have been. Setting type took hours, creating a graphic required the painstaking process of creating a woodcut; but once the type was set it could be reproduced inexpensively and exactly.

Now, as I type this entry on my trusty PowerBook, I wonder where Gutenberg’s technology will wind up. Will the next generation even need paper? How soon will it be before my “state of the art” printshop is exhibited at a national park?

“This is how they did it back then.” echoes in my ears, and the grey hairs in my beard are becoming more numerous by the day.

How to make sure there’s something wrong with your print job – Part 2

The voice on the other end of the phone had become so very familiar to all of us over the past few days.

“I’m just calling to check on you,” she said.

“No, you’re not.” I thought. “Well, I’m doing just fine.” I said. I was going to make her ask.

“How’s my job coming?” she asked.

Looking at my watch, I thought, “Not too much differently than two hours ago, the last time you called.”

“We still haven’t seen the proof we talked about this morning,” I said. “Have you made the final revisions?”

“No, I had to show it to my supervisor so he could go over it. He hasn’t gotten it back to you yet?”

Trouble, right here in River City. The project had actually started well. We had plenty of notice. In fact, we knew the event was coming over a month ahead of time. We had discussed timetables, options for preparing the materials, deadlines. The customer had listened and nodded her head. We thought she understood. In retrospect, I now think she was sleeping.

The first sign of trouble was a missed deadline. The event was Tuesday. We had asked for all of the program materials, bios, and photos one week ahead of the event. On Monday, she called.

“I don’t have everything ready,” she said breathlessly. “You just can’t believe how busy it’s been here. If I get it to you by Wednesday afternoon, can we still have everything on Tuesday morning?”

I expect this call. Unless the customer has proved that they can actually stick to a schedule, we assume that they can’t and add a day. This also allows for mechanical problems, computer glitches, and the host of unknown gremlins that can and do attack without any forewarning.

“Wednesday afternoon will be OK, but we really will have to have everything in,” my standard answer. “It needs to be ready to go and we’ll have to turn the proof around really quickly to get it all done.”

I’m talking reality here. The customer made an affirming noise on the phone. I could picture her nodding. I still didn’t realize that she was asleep.

When Wednesday afternoon was nearly over, I called. She arrived at 12:45 pm Thursday with a sack full of folders. I listened patiently as she explained what she had done, making a list of what would have to be straightened out. I really hadn’t wanted to work over the weekend, and was seeing my Saturday morning vanish into a pile of paper. We had been discussing the job and the schedule at our daily meetings, so everything went right into prepress with a bright red “HOT” sticker on it.

It took her 20 minutes to drive back to her office, 5 minutes to get settled at her desk, and 30 seconds to dial the number. “How’s my job coming? Is the proof ready yet?”

Poor Richard’s law says that the more you call, the longer it takes. The customer’s calls continued on an almost hourly basis for the next 2 days. Everybody talked to her. It was difficult to work on her job (or anyone else’s) for answering the phone to tell her the current status. The revision count mounted throughout the day on Friday. We thought we were finished at the end of the day on Friday, but then she left work early without returning the proof. Monday morning early we had a promise that there were “just a few more little changes.” Then a two hour lull in telephone activity was followed by her surprise that her supervisor hadn’t returned the proof yet.

“When you get the proof, how long will it take you to run it? Can you deliver it to me this afternoon still?”

I’m incredulous. The project will take 7 hours run time plus 3 hours in bindery to assemble. At least it will run digitally and there’s no worry about ink drying. I explain that there is no possible way that the materials will deliver today. If the proof isn’t returned quickly with a signature, the job won’t deliver at all. We’re going to be working late and we’ll deliver in the morning before the meeting begins.

If I could receive color over the fax machine, the proof would have been bleeding red. Apparently, the supervisor didn’t like the changes our customer had made to his writing. He reverted most of it back to the version we had originally received.

The job got done. My right hand man, Brian, stayed late. Joe came in early. I put together books. The materials were delivered before the meeting began. I hope it was all OK. I can’t say with certainty that it was.

The phone’s been less insistent since the job was delivered, but I’m waiting for a call. One of the changes in one of the revisions was missed; or it wasn’t changed back. Why were we charged so much for layout and proofs?

I’m also waiting for a check. Poor Richard’s law says the bigger the rush, the slower the payment.

Ain’t life grand?

How to make sure there’s something wrong with your print job — Part 1

The look on her face told it all. What she saw in the box was not what she expected. “What’s wrong?,” I asked. “Is there a problem?”

“These aren’t the size I expected,” she replied.

I went to get the job jacket for her project. Unfortunately, mistakes are made at printshops. When we mess up, we fix it; but we always want to see what has happened. I pulled the proof she had signed and measured between the crop marks. The dimensions were exactly the same as the finished product.

“I don’t understand,” I told her as I showed her the measurements.

“So that’s what those are for!” she replied, and everything became clear. We had sent a proof with crop marks indicating size, but the customer didn’t know what a crop mark was!

“I still don’t understand how you could have designed it that way,” she continued, “I told the person I spoke with that this piece had to fit in an envelope.”

I pulled out a #10 envelope and showed her that the piece would indeed fit comfortably inside.

“Oh, is that a standard envelope?” she responded. “My envelopes aren’t that size!”

Mistakes are very expensive at printshops. The products we make are useful only to the customer that commissions them. If the customer doesn’t accept the finished product, it becomes trash and a total loss to the printer. There’s really nothing else we can do with it and margins are not nearly so good that we can take a whole lot of total loss.

Because of this, we’re really fanatical about proofs. Everything is spelled out — quantities, colors, paper, and size. But in this case, the customer didn’t understand the way we communicated. In fact, she later admitted that she thought the proof “looked a little funny.” But she didn’t ask a question about it. She just signed it.

There are many methods to virtually assure that something will go wrong with your print job. Here are the first two:

Method 1: Don’t take the time to review the proof

Any good printer has 20 to 30 jobs in process at one time. We have to be pretty good at details, but we cannot track all of the details of all of the jobs at one time. When we proof internally, it’s generally for format. If information is given to us digitally (for example, in a Microsoft Word file) to flow into a document for print, we’re going to assume that you’ve already read through it. We won’t be looking at it very carefully.

We’re also very cautious about changing grammar or punctuation. Punctuation and grammar today are like ethical relativism. Just because it’s wrong to me (or your grammar school English teacher) doesn’t mean that it’s wrong in the customer’s eyes. If you type it that way, we assume that you want it that way; even if Miss Birch (my grammar school English teacher) would say that it’s wrong.

Read the proof carefully. Check things like names, addresses, and phone numbers on business cards. Poor Richard’s law says that the phone number will always be wrong on an unproofed business card. Read backwards for spelling. You’ll be surprised at how the misspelled words will jump out at you.

Method 2: Do lots of proofs and make lots of changes

Editing should really be done long before the printer gets the job, especially if the project is a team effort. Poor Richard’s law says that the more revisions you make, the greater the likelihood that something will be missed.

Proofing is a one person project. Poor Richard’s law says that if two or more are proofing, one will revise the other’s correction. Your printer will not know which version to choose and your project will go into printer’s limbo until we can figure it out. This means sending more proofs and time delays. If it gets too bad, we kind of freeze up like your computer does when you overload it. We may even make you wait until the next morning when the shop is rebooted before we send you another proof.

We really don’t advise calling on the phone. The person you talk to on the phone will rarely be the one who makes the changes to your job and they won’t have your project in front of them. Printshops are busy places. You’ll be throwing another bowling pin at the juggler who is already handling about 12 of them and keeping the plates spinning on the end of the stick, too.

Printers love documentation. Write out your changes and send them by email or fax. Put them all together in one email or fax, not a string of several of them. When the revision comes, make the final small corrections. If we miss or misunderstand something on the revision, then give us a phone call.

Please ask questions. If you don’t understand something, ask. We want to deliver exactly what you want, but this won’t happen if we’re not communicating clearly with one another. Remember that when you sign the proof, you are accepting responsibility for the accuracy of your project. If it “looks funny,” ask about it.

As it turns out, our customer’s cards did fit in the envelopes she intended to use. There was no additional expense or pain for either of us. The wires were still tangled, though, and that’s a losing situation for us. Maybe she’ll read my blog and understand.