Is there anyone here who either does commercial printing (2- or 4-color brochures, newsletters, etc.) or who is a graphic designer who does layout for those types of products who would be willing to answer some questions for me? Mostly regarding general costs, viability of short runs, layout turnaround, file format, etc.
I can answer some (I am a designer). For prices you’ll really need to call a few printers and get quotes, though I can advise on how to reduce costs and recommend some printers.
What specific questions do you have?
Well glad there’s someone there!
Okay, the story is: I am part of an organization that is putting out an 8-page newsletter. We have been told by the person in charge that:
-
Nobody does offset printing anymore for newsletters.
-
Very few companies will do short runs (1,000 copies) - “most places won’t even talk to you for less than 25,000 copies”).
-
Nobody will accept a file in anything other than Quark or Pagemaker, or possibly Acrobat.
-
It’s highly unusual for a printing company to also do the layout and if they do, they are doing you a big favor.
-
The Post Office requires you to say something like “This is a quarterly publication of the XXX Organization” on the masthead.
Are any of these true?
I will probably have more questions as people’s responses come in. Thanks!
Thought up another one:
- We were told that it’s supposedly very difficult and cumbersome to provide an electronic proof of the layout. (Such as, a Quark file converted to Acrobat so that people who don’t have Quark can open it and view the design.) Even a photocopy of the final layout is very difficult. It’s necessary to actually travel to the printer and look at the mock-ups there on site. True?
Let’s see here:
-
Mostly true. Digital presses are taking over that market. Think of them as super tricked-out copiers. They are ideal for short run jobs.
-
Again, mostly true. Although I’d put the break point for a small print shop somewhere around 5k. The larger shops, maybe 10k to 20k.
-
Yeah. The prepress folks want to see Quark, InDesign or RageMaker files for the most part. PDF is gaining traction, but the key is that not all PDFs are the same. Most shops really only want PDFs generated by one of the above programs.
-
Absolutely. That’s what designers are for.
-
Maybe. The Post Office has a million obscure rules.
-
Total crap. Any competent printer should be able to offer blueline and color proofs as well as a PDF of the final piece. Not that these would be free or anything.
Sure they do. For small runs digital may be cheaper, though.
Companies will do small runs. However, setting up the printer is the big charge, so printing 25k copies may work out to $1 a copy while 1k copies might be $10 copy (numbers totally made up). That’s for offset; as I said, digital is often cheaper for small runs since it doesn’t need as much setup.
Some printers are very picky–I had one make me change my crop marks since they were 9picas offset rather than 12picas. Your trim better not be 9 picas off anyway! Some printers will work with you and will print any old file type you hand them. However, Quark, Pagemaker and Indesign are the only real professional desktop publishing programs out there; if you are using MS word or the like to design it’s probably not going to look very professional.
I don’t know any printer that does layout. [designer plug] I’d suggest working with a designer, who has the several thousand dollars worth of tools to do the job right and will deliver the files to your printer in the proper formats. Unless you’re doing something very simple, you’re going to run into issues of crops, bleeds, image resolution, color formats, fonts, etc. that you may not be familar with. [/plug]
Don’t know. If you are mailing, however, to get the best rate you will have to abide by the postal service guidelines so that the machines can process it, but that’s mostly certain areas you can’t print on, where the addy should go, tri-folds must be sealed, etc. You can find this info at usps.gov.
No. I often get pdf proofs from the printer, particuarly if I’m in a rush and not too worried about color. However, if color matching is a concern, you will want a printed proof that will reproduce the final colors much better than a screen display. And they have always mailed or messengered me the proofs, though it might be fun to tour the printers. 
And if the printer is there they can explain about things like the crops and paper.
Surprising answers - only because I looked at some printers’ Web sites and a lot of them said they do short runs all the time. (I would of course expect the costs per piece to be higher.)
Re printers doing layout: most of the ones I saw do offer layout services on site. That is, they have graphic designers on staff who will do the layout. I didn’t mean that the guy operating the presses would also do the layout. The designers would be paid extra, of course.
Re proofs: this is the big one - that it’s “impossible” to provide proofs. Several of the companies I looked at on line also offer FTP from their Web site and allow you to view proofs on line right there. (I would also expect that non-electronic proofs would cost something - either built in to the overall cost or extra.)
The Post Office question was brought up because we were told that frequency-of-publication thing was required but I’ve got about 10 newsletters here and none of them have it.
No printer has told my organization any of this stuff, by the way; it’s the person who is handling the process (one of our employees) who is saying so, or saying that the printer said so.
Well thanks everyone, this has been quite helpful. Anyone else feel free to add, if you like.
I will probably be taking over the management of this process for the next newsletter, so all this info is very helpful! I have done this kind of thing before but not been “in charge” - there was always someone with more experience running it.
I’ve done newsletter layout–and bulk mailed the result.
You don’t have to have frequency of publication on your newsletter. You should, though, read up on the postal bulk mail regulations. The easiest way, IMHO, is to go down to your local BMEU and ask the folks to help you out. They’ve got a plastic card that you can lay over the mailpiece that shows you where the address has to be, etc. It’s much easier to use that than to read through the rules, which are nearly incomprehensible, but the folks at the BMEU know the rules and can explain them to you.
There’s a book you can pick up at the post office, or you can read it in all its unreadable glory on the USPS website–
http://usps.com/businessmail101/welcome.htm
It is absolutely essential that you follow the POs rules on designing the mail piece. I’ve had newsletters hung up for nearly a month because they wouldn’t go through the machine right. And since our newsletters go out mostly to inform our list members of concert dates in the next month, well, you can imagine how that went over.
A poster mentioned earlier that doing a newsletter with Word won’t get you very professional-looking results. I know from personal experience that you can actually get fairly professional-looking results with Word, but it will take years off your life and quite possibly induce a strong desire to strangle yourself with a printer cable rather than ever do it again. A used copy of PageMaker, purchased on eBay, and a minute to transfer the registration online, saved my sanity. Please save yourself heartache and either hire someone to do the designing, or get yourself one of the packages mentioned above. Not only will it be easier to do the things you can do only with extreme difficulty in Word, you’ll also be able to do about seven million other things that will make the quality of the whole project much, much higher.
I call bullshit on that one. Anyone who owns Acrobat Distiller can easily create a PDF from any program that can be printed from. This is about the only way you can get an accurate proof to someone through e-mail.
If the printer is using a recent version of Pagemaker, they already have the capability of creating a PDF (Acrobat and Pagemaker are both Adobe applications).
The latest trend I’ve noticed with the printers I deal with is that they’ve all dumped Pagemaker for CorelDraw and they kick themselves for being so stuck to Pagemaker for all those years when it only has half the capabilities of CorelDraw.
Hey! What about us FrameMaker users?
Okay, that program is tailored more towards the Thick Complicated Book market, but the printers I deal with have no problem accepting output from FM. Mostly because we send the output as Adobe PDF.
We get proofs as well. Mind you, these are for manuals that are ordered on an on-going basis, not something that needs a quick turnaround and will be replaced, like a newsletter.
When sending PDFs, make absolutely sure that your fonts are embedded. This is the number-one source of problems in PDFs, I have found. If the PDF reaches the destination machine and a font is missing, the reader will try to replace it with what it considers to be the closest match. This invariably has Bad Results.
Additionally, you can make PDFs using various versions of the PDF standard. This affects comptibility and readability, with older versions being easier to read. This is among the options buried in your PDF-creation settings. Talk to your printers–they should be able to guide you on the best settings to use with them.
You don’t need Adobe Acrobat to make PDFs–OpenOffice will create them from text documents, for example, and many illustration programs will save their drawings as PDF as well. What Adobe Acrobat gets you is PDF editing capabilites, and a “PDF printer” that appears to be Just Another Printer in your system, and makes PDFs out of anything you care to send it.
Um, I think we’re supposed to stay over here in the corner. All four of us.
Sorry for the delay in getting back - I was away this weekend. Thanks to everyone again for responding.
I have some design questions now:
How much are we supposed to tell the designer? We have no previous newsletters for them to get any ideas from. Do we just give them the text and tell them it’s supposed to fill 8 pages and let them do whatever? Do we tell them which fonts we do want, or more importantly, DON’T want, used? Do we say things like, “I want this particular picture as a transparent layer in the background; that picture I want to the left of this article,” etc., or does the designer decide all that stuff? Does the designer choose the borders, shape of inset boxes, or which text to sidebar - or do we tell him that?
What’s a reasonable fee for a layout? I don’t mean specifically but for instance, would an 8-page newsletter be $100 to lay out? $1,000? Do layout artists bill hourly or by the length of the job (4 pages vs. 8 pages)?
“4-color” really means full-color, right? Does 2-color mean two colors besides black or does it mean something like blue text and green text, but the blue and green might be done in varying intensities of the same Pantone shade, with grayscale photographs?
Would it helpful to a designer to do a rough mock-up in, say, Word; showing roughly where to put the pictures, how big we want the titles to be, which text to sidebar - or is that a pain for the designer, or an insult? (As if he needed someone to spell it all out for him.)
Different folks bill differently. Some by the hour some by the job. I’d ask to see some of their previous work and you can judge whether it’s worth the price. Anywhere from $50 to $100/page isn’t unreasonable for newsletters depending on the amount of work involved, where you are (New York will be higher than Boise) and the experience of the designer. If you need them to touch-up photos or supply line art it could go even higher.
4/c typically refers to 4-color-process work: CMYK. These colors are used to make most of the visible colors you see. If the design is 2-color, then it’s two colors, usually black plus one spot color. Black counts as a color. You can use the spot colors, whether black or some PMS color, for whatever you want.
It would be easier to sketch it on paper with a pencil to give a rough idea what you’re looking for than to mock it up in Word. But the more freedom you give the designer, the more creative they can be. If you have certain typefaces that you hate, it reasonable to say so up front. You should tell them which story you want for the front, which is a sidebar and what picture goes with each story. If you’re giving them photos, real actual printed photos to scan, use a felt pen or sticker on the back to identify them - or affix them to a sheet of paper and draw where you want it cropped and label it on the paper.
Yeah, that program really pisses me off too.
I usually call it PageMangler or PageSlayer.
You should tell them about how big you want it, the specs (paper size, paper type, colors, whether you want to tri-fold it for mailing, etc.), what order you want the articles in, whether you want “continued on page 4” from page 1 to make a nice tidy page or the articles just lined up one after the other even if that leaves gaps. Don’t worry, if the designer needs to know something they will ask you. Things you want emphasized should be noted. Any photos or pictures you want used should be provided to the designer (in at least 300 dpi), but you can also say “I want some art to go with this article” and the designer will find you some. (This art will range from free and generally crappy clipart to $100 on way up for royalty-free/rights managed photos and illustration–you will be expected to pay for this or the designer will include it in their estimate–ask) I would advise against saying things like “on page 3 we want this pic here and this headline here and the text to start here, etc” unless you are sure what you want and/or think your design is better than what the designer could come up with.
Depends on the designer. For $100 you would likely not get someone very good; someone with the tools but perhaps not much design chops. $1000 would be more like it, although you may live in an area with cheaper designers or find a really good cheap one. If the newletter template is set up properly, new newsletters should be considerably cheaper since you don’t have to redo the whole thing, just pop in new articles and graphics and tweak a bit. Some designers bill hourly, some bill a flat fee based on how much work they think it will be. The length of the newletter will figure in the price some, but unless they’re cranking them out like an assembly line they will also figure in how complex a job they expect it to be, if there are special requests like scanning and cleaning up the art or custom graphics, how many revisions they expect the client will ask for, etc.
4-color is CYMK, generally considered full-color, but that’s not ALL-color; you can’t get certain color ranges in CYMK, but it’s plenty for most purposes. 2-color is generally black plus one spot (pantone) color, but you can do two spots (no black then). Once you get into 3-color the savings over 4 color are generally small enough that it’s not worth the hassle to do 3 color, IMHO. You can do varying intensities of the colors, and even duo- and tritones where you use the 2 and 3 colors together to do photos and other bitmap-based pieces–duotones and tritones are not really for beginners, though.
It’ll save the designer some time, but what you’ll get in the end is a slightly classier version of what you did; to really take advantage of the designer’s skills, give them more free rein. What would really be helpful (if I was the designer) is some examples of what sort of newletters you like and what sort of feel you want it to have: whether it should look techy or professional or funky or modern or old-timey, etc.
This has all been extremely helpful. Thanks everyone!
I am looking forward to this issue, which will be the first one for which the guy we have does the layout. I am probably worrying needlessly about things. This newsletter was a little rushed; or rather, the timing of reviewing first-round edits was too late and so everything is a little tight now and I wish I knew more about the layout guy. But it will probably turn out fine.