Save Money on your printing cost

My last blog was about my experience and education. Working in the print field I've found a lot of clients just wasting money because they don't really understand the concept of color.

There are a lot of people that are the do-it-yourself or who bought Photoshop and decided to do Graphic Design without any experience or education in the print field because they have a creative talent.

The most common mistake would be not understanding 2-color vs. 4-color or just color vs. black only.  Everyone wants Full (4-color) prints but they don't do any investigation on the cost difference.  If you design a form and want a line of red but send it off to the online printers and click color, your actually paying for 4-color. In reality you could change the document to separate a red (pantone) color and black... you will see the cost come down significantly.

Do some investigating, make sure the piece your printing needs to be a color.  If it doesn't matter to the customer, make it black and explain that since this is just a form, they would be better off saving some money to put in the color jobs later that will bring them more business.

Here are some other things you can do to save money material that I found while searching it goes into more detail for the Graphic Designer in us:

http://www.davidairey.com/12-money-saving-questions-on-commercial-printing/

Do you have any other ideas or comments?

Getting to know your blogger

There are things in the print field that every Graphic Designer should know but to many do not which ultimately cost their customers and themselves a lot of money! 

Getting to know your blogger :) HELLO!

I've been in the graphic and print industry for quite some time now. It started in High School for me. I attended the Sikeston Career and Technology Center's Graphic Arts program, where I learned about the world of print.

We started off on the design end by learning PageMaker and Quark Express. Most of my time there was spent learning how to print on an AB-dick 1-color press. I learned the bindery department i.e. folding, stapling and cutting. Back then in 2001 we learned the way of making negatives by camera,  stripping them and then platemaking, which is almost obsolete because of the computer-to-plate, which eliminated a whole lot of jobs.

After high school I went to Hickey College where I took a Graphic Design course. There I learned all the Adobe Suite products like Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver and InDesign. We learned a lot about design and a little about the actual printing process, but that was ok with me because of the Graphic Arts program from Sykeston. We had to dive into our drawing skills and creative side of the brain, which was fun and exciting! Learning all the Adobe Products and just designing in school I thought, "man it would be so awesome to get paid to do this, almost feels like a steal because you love it so much". That's what I do and it never gets old.

When I got my Associated in Graphic Design I decided to get my Bachelor Degree in Applied Management. So just in case in the future I wanted to operate my own business or just have the education I could put to use right away, I would have it.

Then I went to Fontbonne University and got my Masters in Business Administration. Mainly to show myself that I could do it. Sometimes the key to success is just believing in yourself. I learned a lot of useful things that I use every day of my life.

I worked at Optima Graphics as a Mac Operator, when I just started the Bachelor Degree program from Hickey College.  I cleaned-up/set-up trade-show artwork for print. This is where I was introduced to the wonderful world of color matching, yay! Who would ever think that getting the colors perfect would be such a wonderful feeling of accomplishment! That taught me patients and to never give up, if you want a color there is always a way to achieve it or come pretty close.

I currently work at Vip Printing, Service.  I've worked here for the past 4 years. I do all of the graphics, whatever needs to be done… graphic design, typesetting, set files up to print, color matching and the list goes on. Vip printing, Service has been around for 40 years and I hope it's around for 40 more.