Imagine Working Fearlessly

Imagine that every time you sat down to work on a print project you knew exactly what you were doing. Every. Time.

Imagine toiling away in InDesign freely, in a state of flow, adding elements, images, colors, making size and bindery decisions quickly and efficiently… confident that the proofs were going to look as you expected them to… knowing that the days when the printer called and said “Houston, we have a problem” were long behind you… eagerly anticipating the client’s call, “OMG these look amazing! THANK YOU!”, instead of picking up this voicemail “Ummm, we got the folders, we need to talk, my boss is freaking out”. Imagine winning so many awards that it is pointless to continue entering contests…

That’s where I am at, relaxed, confident, mastery. It took me twenty years of designing, print buying, and running a printing company as well as being a CD to get here. I got here by making mistakes and learning from them because I was not trained –formally or informally– in designing for print. These are some of the mistakes I made:

• I used the printer I liked instead of the right printer and paid 4 times what I needed to pay.
• I printed turquoise ink on peach paper and got a brown image because I didn’t know ink was transparent.
• To lower the price for a client I asked for a job to fold cross grain on laid paper (this is where the word fugly originated).
• I had to pay staff to refold, by hand, 250,000 double gatefold mailers because I didn’t know how to proof hatch lines on a folded proof.
• There is more, oh boy, so much more.

I wrote a book about designing for print so that people did not have to go through the expense and humiliation and trust rebuilding I went through. I know that you do not need an eight-week class to learn what you need to know. All you need is to read the parts of my book that are relevant to what you do. This works if you are a working designer, a print buyer or a student.

You can get by without reading this book. Your printer is going to fix your files without telling you. You are going to think that your printer is to blame for mistakes that are yours. You are going to pay way more than you need to when you buy print because you selected the wrong printer for the job. And your jobs are going to take longer.

Tense, worried, rushing v.s. relaxed, confident, flow.

It’s your choice.

Pre-order the book here.