10 Things Printers Can Teach Designers

Designers are visual people and the best way to teach a visual person is to show them. Graphic designers are also curious people who generally like to see how things work. We all walk around with our cameras all day, lauding their efficiency for email, Slack, twitter and more. But it is the instant transmission of images and videos that make showing as easy-as-pie.

Here are 10 ways you can use your smartphone to reach out to your designer customers, add value to your website and make life easier for yourself. 

1. Coated Versus Uncoated. Sit down with a designer and have two paper swatchbooks in front of you and explain coated paper versus uncoated paper. You will have saved yourself countless hours of "it looks like postcard paper" descriptions, and the like.

2. Bleeds. Take a video of your guillotine cutter in action, preferably a job with a bleed. Zoom in on the crop marks, text it to your designer client. (Put it on your website too!)

3. Grain. Look in your sample room for something with a nice black solid. Pull two samples. Fold one sample with the grain. Fold the other sample against the grain. Put them side-by-side folds-up and photograph with your phone. Open the image and crop to relevant image area and mark as a favorite in your phone for quick retrieval.

4. Waste=Cost. Show your client an illustration of paper waste for various page sizes. Here are some examples you can use: (Put it on your website too!)
   

   Example #1 | Credit: Designing for Print by Designing for Print

   

   Example #2 | Credit: Designing for Print by Designing for Print

5. Quantity matters. Walk into your pressroom and film a sheetfed press at the delivery end while it is running for 30 seconds. Confirm run speed with the pressman. Text video to client explaining that’s how long it takes for (insert quantity here) brochures/posters, etc. to run through the press and why they should opt for digital printing on this short run. (At 15,000 iph 30 seconds is 125 sheets, 8-up that’s 1,000 pieces!)

6. Printing is green. Calculate how many pounds of trim, corrugated and electronics you recycle each year (if your trim is picked up and weighed by a recycler they have this info). Next time your vendor picks up a container run out to the parking lot and take a pic. Put the photo on your website with an infographic of the tonnage you recycle annually. Explain that the trim and corrugated goes into future recycled paper products.

7. Ink can change color. Show your client this photo. Explain that the ink formulas with a high percentage of opaque white (basically all pastels) will shift within a year (swatch on left was two years old, on right six months, when photographed). Share that pastel colors are great for a short-lived item like an invitation and not so great for an identity system.

8. Paper makes a difference. Next time you’ve got an attractive job with photos that’s going to run on white paper, order some extra sheets of ivory, canary and grey uncoated paper. Add those colored sheets to the job and photograph the same detail area of all four colors. Make a montage (easy with the Layout app for iphone). Send this montage to a client who is wondering about running a job on colored stock and put it on your website too.
9. How to read a swatchbook. Oh boy, if I had a penny for every time a customer found the “perfect paper” in a swatch book and placed an order specifying that sheet only to find out there wasn’t enough, or it wasn’t stocking or that the chosen color had been discontinued ... this is a great topic to discuss at a quick lunch with a new customer. Text her an image showing how to look up the date of a swatchbook. Then bring her some lunch and a few swatchbooks and show her how to “read” it.

10. Art takes time. Text your idea of a rudimentary schedule to your client as a pdf graphic that they can print out and pin to their idea wall. Next time they are working with a client to develop a timeline, they won’t guess and it saves both them and you a call/email.

Joyce has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the printing of her book, "Designing For Print." The book provides proven advice for designers on how to cost, schedule and build projects for success in digital, offset, letterpress or flexo printing.