@mikibell Couldn’t overprint, it’s a multi page, folded and bound. I considered the possibility of applying an adhesive photo, but the cost of printing 20,000 color labels, then manually applying them with enough accuracy so it didn’t look like a hot mess rapidly approached reprint. Plus the delivery delay of final product was a concern.
@mikibell@ruouttaurmind
Sounds like you might benefit from a new dual-control procedure in production. Make it a $10 reward split between the person that uploaded it as “this is ready to upload” and a different person must then “approve” the print run with the printer.
That adds an incentive, that for you, is far, far less than the $6K cost of not having that extra check. And it gives the two people sending it to the printer an extra set of eyeballs on it, and they get a starbucks out of the deal.
And then you can ask, if it happens again, the two staff to decide what the consequences should be for the equivalent of being able to hire an additional employee for three months or if you had to furlough someone for three months. i.e. an example of what the business can’t do now because ofnthe unexpected $6K spend they causes the company - a second time after the dual control was in place.
@mike808 For exactly the reasons you mention, there are a minimum of two people responsible for verification of finals before the print order is submitted to the press. I’ve spoken with one person in an effort to identify the breakdown, and to evolve our procedures so we don’t have a repeat performance.
The actual cause was an oddity in the way Adobe InDesign and Acrobat handle design elements containing a mix of color standards. We only print in the CMYK color space. Someone placed a Pantone object into the layout which caused the PDF to choke, resulting in the white box where a photo should have been.
The photo is there in the layout, so when a designer looks at the InDesign file everything looks good. It’s only when the file is distilled by Acrobat when the image disappears. But… for reasons we still have not tracked down, the person who actually prepared the PDF sees the photo when previewing it before releasing it for a quality check. This only happens on her workstation. When viewed on any other workstation, we see a white box.
So I’ve got three things to identify:
How do we eliminate Pantone as an available option in our color palette
Why does the PDF look fine on that one workstation
WTF happened to the quality check
Monday afternoon I have a meeting with the guy responsible for quality checking that project. I’ve already verified the PDF doesn’t show correctly on his workstation, so my best guess: he asked the designer if all was good, then rubber stamped it and sent it on it’s way. This is the answer I’m hoping to find because it’s the least complex scenario.
That’s the thing to automate validating that all objects are in the CMYK color space before releasing to print.
Or enforce a prohibition on placing non-CMYK objects into the layout.
Or do both when you can’t trust the other one to be reliable.
The Gimp has some pretty wicked script-fu you can apply to Adobe outputs as a side validation (not directly in the workflow), if that’s an option. Only direct cost would be development, not licensing.
@ruouttaurmind so it isn’t like the good old days when the printer was a good ol’ local boy and maybe even a friend who cared enough about your product to flip thru the first few production samples looking for problems…
@ruouttaurmind my point was to use automation to eliminate human error for this technical problem, now that you know you have it. Then there’s the mitigation cost benefit question you’ll have to answer from the business side.
@RedOak No good ol’ boy printer. We use a large press operation, and we’re just another faceless print job to the guys that run the press.
But… the department who set the pages for the press have a history of flagging major quality issues they’ve noticed when setting. The guys that run the web always check the first several pages for color calibration and shift the color plates for accuracy. They would have noticed the missing photo, and have a history of pulling the job and running something else, giving us an opportunity to correct. Not that they’ve caught every stupid thing that we’ve done, but major errors like this have never made it past multiple eyeballs in the past without someone throwing up a flag.
@mike808 Adobe has a preflight utility we use to validate files. In this case, I think I need to challenge the profile created for that utility. I may be able to tweak it to check for this particular error (as well as verify our definitions for other potential issues).
@mikibell Was this from today?
Sort of strikes home for me after a major publishing blunder my staff made this week.
@ruouttaurmind yes from today… Sorry about your staff… Was it REALLLLY bad?
@mikibell Expensive, but not as bad as the Yahoo blunder. Publishing error
@ruouttaurmind ouch… can you not run them through a printer or stick the photo on it – as an added benefit??
@mikibell Couldn’t overprint, it’s a multi page, folded and bound. I considered the possibility of applying an adhesive photo, but the cost of printing 20,000 color labels, then manually applying them with enough accuracy so it didn’t look like a hot mess rapidly approached reprint. Plus the delivery delay of final product was a concern.
@ruouttaurmind that sucks!! My fil was a printer and the stories he tells about past mistakes are just horrid… Some are funny, but always costly…
@mikibell I would have been thrilled to have been jarred from a sound sleep a 3AM with a call from the printer asking about the missing image.
@mikibell @ruouttaurmind
Sounds like you might benefit from a new dual-control procedure in production. Make it a $10 reward split between the person that uploaded it as “this is ready to upload” and a different person must then “approve” the print run with the printer.
That adds an incentive, that for you, is far, far less than the $6K cost of not having that extra check. And it gives the two people sending it to the printer an extra set of eyeballs on it, and they get a starbucks out of the deal.
And then you can ask, if it happens again, the two staff to decide what the consequences should be for the equivalent of being able to hire an additional employee for three months or if you had to furlough someone for three months. i.e. an example of what the business can’t do now because ofnthe unexpected $6K spend they causes the company - a second time after the dual control was in place.
@mike808 For exactly the reasons you mention, there are a minimum of two people responsible for verification of finals before the print order is submitted to the press. I’ve spoken with one person in an effort to identify the breakdown, and to evolve our procedures so we don’t have a repeat performance.
The actual cause was an oddity in the way Adobe InDesign and Acrobat handle design elements containing a mix of color standards. We only print in the CMYK color space. Someone placed a Pantone object into the layout which caused the PDF to choke, resulting in the white box where a photo should have been.
The photo is there in the layout, so when a designer looks at the InDesign file everything looks good. It’s only when the file is distilled by Acrobat when the image disappears. But… for reasons we still have not tracked down, the person who actually prepared the PDF sees the photo when previewing it before releasing it for a quality check. This only happens on her workstation. When viewed on any other workstation, we see a white box.
So I’ve got three things to identify:
How do we eliminate Pantone as an available option in our color palette
Why does the PDF look fine on that one workstation
WTF happened to the quality check
Monday afternoon I have a meeting with the guy responsible for quality checking that project. I’ve already verified the PDF doesn’t show correctly on his workstation, so my best guess: he asked the designer if all was good, then rubber stamped it and sent it on it’s way. This is the answer I’m hoping to find because it’s the least complex scenario.
@ruouttaurmind
That’s the thing to automate validating that all objects are in the CMYK color space before releasing to print.
Or enforce a prohibition on placing non-CMYK objects into the layout.
Or do both when you can’t trust the other one to be reliable.
The Gimp has some pretty wicked script-fu you can apply to Adobe outputs as a side validation (not directly in the workflow), if that’s an option. Only direct cost would be development, not licensing.
@ruouttaurmind so it isn’t like the good old days when the printer was a good ol’ local boy and maybe even a friend who cared enough about your product to flip thru the first few production samples looking for problems…
@ruouttaurmind my point was to use automation to eliminate human error for this technical problem, now that you know you have it. Then there’s the mitigation cost benefit question you’ll have to answer from the business side.
@RedOak No good ol’ boy printer. We use a large press operation, and we’re just another faceless print job to the guys that run the press.
But… the department who set the pages for the press have a history of flagging major quality issues they’ve noticed when setting. The guys that run the web always check the first several pages for color calibration and shift the color plates for accuracy. They would have noticed the missing photo, and have a history of pulling the job and running something else, giving us an opportunity to correct. Not that they’ve caught every stupid thing that we’ve done, but major errors like this have never made it past multiple eyeballs in the past without someone throwing up a flag.
@mike808 Adobe has a preflight utility we use to validate files. In this case, I think I need to challenge the profile created for that utility. I may be able to tweak it to check for this particular error (as well as verify our definitions for other potential issues).
@ruouttaurmind blame the GOAT!
Hehehehe
@rtjhnstn gotta admit that’s the first thing I thought of too! I miss Kliban’s stuff…
