Niche Market - Preflight Outsourcing

If you take a look in your purse or pockets, there will be a mix of new technology with the old.  As much as people keep saying that printing is a dying industry, your cell phone is probably sitting right next to printed items in your pocket.  From receipts, packaging and tags, to even the credit cards in your wallet, printing is involved in it all, and yet so many of the designers I come in contact with on a regular basis have very little understanding of the printing process.  

Having had 13 years of experience both running the presses and creating designs for others to run on the presses, I have a great respect for those who take what I design and make it look incredibly good in print.  I also have a great respect for those designers who take the time to learn the printing and finishing process before heading straight into print design. 

The division between design and the actual physical labor involved with finishing a print design is growing. At one time the pressmen and plate makers were considered the artists of the printing industry, now the artists (called graphic designers today) rarely even come in contact with the people who make their designs come to life on paper.  This division causes a bottleneck between the design process and the presses.  Designers know too little about the printing process, creating files that take hours to prepare for the presses.  A print ready file should only take minutes to send to the press.

It is at this bottleneck that the pre-press department usually sits.   The pre-press department takes files that are submitted for print, and preflights them (ensures that they are print ready files) and then prepares the necessary items needed for printing on the presses (layout and plating).   Already one of those processes is being phased out due to the increasingly more sophisticated plating equipment being offered on the market.  The plating process is beginning to be combined with the press printing process. 

A press runs by using plates, almost like negatives in film printing, for a print job.  Typically the pre-press departments for printing companies are held responsible for the layout and creation of those plates.  Companies like Heidelberg have been creating increasingly more user-friendly software and hardware for the creation of those plates, enabling the actual pressmen to layout and create their own plates from the files that are submitted to them.

Since this takes one task away from the pre-press department, and design is increasingly being outsourced to design houses, that leaves only one task left for the pre-press department to handle, preflight.  Preflight is the process for  reviewing and ensuring files are print ready before they are plated.  Once the task of plating becomes the pressmens responsibility, preflighting doesn’t seem like a job that needs to be kept in-house.  

I propose a web based pre-press company be created in order to offer printing companies the opportunity to outsource the preflighting of documents rather than pay the overhead of employing someone directly for the job.  Preflighting a document takes minutes, and it would be hard to justify the cost of employing someone directly to handle such a simple and easy task that has been automated by multiple software companies.

Not only could this be a useful tool for printing companies, it could be a tool for designers. Designers can receive feedback on a job before sending it on to the printer, possibly avoiding the mistakes that can happen if a file is not a print ready file. 

This new company would eliminate the bottleneck of files by creating an outlet for designers to send their files for input before sending to the printing company.  This would ensure that files only take minutes to prepare for the presses leaving the printing company to be able to spend more time on making the designs come to life on paper.  

The printing industry is changing, we need to make sure we change with it.