Here is a printing company in Surry Hills. When I was reading through their website, and as I’ve been looking around at all of this stuff elsewhere as well, I’ve been remembering issues that came up back when I worked for a photographer. When you do your own digital design and then send it away to be printed by someone else, you have to keep certain things in mind, such as:
-text or important parts of an image or design should not get too close to the edge where it will be cut or folded. If the machine is off even a little bit it can completely ruin your print. We had this issue sometimes when printing wallet sized photos with the business name and copyright watermark in the corner. It doesn’t look very professional when part of the business name has been cut off.
-the color on your monitor should be calibrated with the printers. Nothing like getting a picture back and finding out your brown is their purple.
-vector vs. raster graphics – not everything that looks good on screen (certain fonts, etc.) will print out right on paper. Not sure how to deal with this. I need to look into it more.
-image resolution. This would be an issue if a designer is uploading an image rather than designing through the interface/website itself. I do know that when you upload pictures to the internet to have them printed, most places will warn you if the resolution is too low for a good quality print, so this certainly isn’t something new.
These are the types of things you know about and work around if you do this regularly, but if you are just some random person who decides to make a package one day, you probably won’t be thinking about these, and therefore it needs to be dealt with from the beginning for my purposes.
This of course brings up the issue of proofing, something that you can’t really do in this situation unless you want to make a trial run first and call it your proof then make a final one (or another proof if needed). When you’re only making one package, you have to pay up to proof it, I suppose. I don’t see any other way around this. However, knowing these issues of color differences and small machine offsets and errors that are bound to happen, you just learn to work with it. You learn to keep the text a certain distance from the edge, you learn to check your colors and you can usually go without proofing something, if you know what you are doing (ideal for repeat customers, but not for one time customers) and when you get a print back that isn’t what you want, you take that loss (and it’s usually your own fault, at least in my experience, or you get the printers to redo it for free – a hassle but just part of the business of digital design and printing) and do it again.
If the interface is good enough to show the designer what their package will look like before it’s even printed, and the printers and cutters don’t mess up the job (in which case, each job should be inspected before being sent out to the customer – not unrealistic considering they need to be put together anyway), then the only major problems I can see happening would be if there is a problem on the designers end, such as the color being off, in which case there’s really nothing that can be done from the business end.
Anyway, I’m just typing out my thoughts here. I also found this blog about cd and dvd cover design but haven’t had a chance to look over it yet.
