Reply To: What do you do?

Hello!

Thinking of things that we do (the topic of this thread, and especially since Hank earlier mentioned being a screen printer), I'm wondering how many of us have actually operated a printing press, since for some of us, that what the final output will be. Not that everyone has to run a press (especially if one is designing for the web!!), and there are of course, a lot of great designers who never ran a press. Running a press can be so frustrating !! Really really frustrating. If you want to “meet the press”, prepare to be frustrated.

I've done pretty much the whole cycle, from inputting in the keyboard, doing the design in InDesign, making the plate, and running it on an offset press (an old Multilith 1250W). That includes all the nastiness such as cleaning the press (remember that offset ink is like very stiff grease), getting the paper in the water fountain (and all the headache of cleanup after that), paper in the ink rollers, paper stuck on the rubber blanket, paper which misses the grippers, registration headaches, wrecking the plate in the middle of the run, cleaning the press yet again, etc. etc. If we think we get misfeeds on a laser printer or ink jet, that's nothing. An offset press has a thousand more ways to misfeed paper, and at a much higher speed too.

There are a lot of tricks that press operators could do, if they really wanted to, like putting two spot colors on each side of the ink tray to print two different colors in one pass (one half of the page is one color, and the half of the page is the other color), but I don't think I could convince my current print supplier to do that…..

Once we didn't have any powder for the coated stock, so out of desperation, I put baby powder in the powder sprayer. The “pressroom” started smelling more like a nursury…. !!

For a while, when someone on InDesignSecrets wrote “Talk to your print provider” on the blog, it was a bit amusing, since on the other side of the wall (behind the computer with InDesign) was the press….But in some ways, I'm glad I'm not my own print provider now. Takes away a lot of frustration.

Ooops! I think I'm getting off topic.