Mr Pre-Press Speaks!

A physical book/portfolio is essential, and a co-equal to a web presence.

A physical book lets an interviewer scan your work in less than a minute, and know exactly what you can and cannot do. They don’t have to wait for a Flash/media presentation to load. No cut on all the Flash wizards out there, but they want to get in, and out, fast.

They don’t care about anything else.

Sometimes an original item is a showstopper, and provides physical evidence that you are capable of handling large print projects.

I produced a 355pp high-end furniture catalog several years ago. This monster was printed at Geo Rice & Sons, lush and sweet. Ditto for annual reports, where 4/4 plus spots are more often used.

Exceptions would be telephone books, newspaper, OfficeDepot catalogs, etc.

Presentation styles come and go. I’ve seen slide portfolios, 8×10 trannies, matted flat pieces, laminated ‘place mats’, 8×10 vinyl books [in varying degrees of finish], godzilla attache cases, etc. Currently I’m in the higher-end vinyl sleeved book place.

A multtude of sins and defects can be hidden in a 50% reduction of a double-truck spread to an 8-1/2 x 11 page. Colors become more saturated and rich, etc.

But back to Flash and other media: this brings up questions of process versus content, which I’ll revisit at a later time.

A splendid time will be had by all.

Periodically Mr Pre-Press examines larger issues that eventually become part of the design/layout/pre-press experience. Today’s field trip looks at Conceptual Art and Installations. We’ll stop for ice cream afterwards.

Left-Overture: Pictures At An Exhibition

Post-Modern art sucks. You’ve seen the same tired, date-expired MFA thesis shows. The Cream-of-Wheat blur of anemic white-boy poser product in galleries. You’ve wondered “…why does this suck so badly?” You also may have asked “why are critics jacking on this so hard?”

There’s no there, there. How else can you explain a guy who swiped Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters (original intellectual property), enlarged them, painted them on 1/8″ masonite, silhouetted them, and then sold them for $16,000. Now that’s a hustle.

Post-modern art is less honest and more whorish than every big-screen TV ad you’ve ever endured. I’ll venture that the TV ads are more honest. Its that bad. Let’s take a look at the moving parts that comprise this Unholy Beast.

And what exactly is this uh…magnificent…thing?

• its a 1:3 scale model of a P-3 Orion subchaser that force-landed in Hainan in 1997. See all my notes?
• its an array of lamp-posts. I clustered them into a tight grid, and got a real-estate tycoon to buy it!
• this projected sign is a declamatory statement And meaningful in a ironic way, subtly highlighting victimhood. Mine, yours…whatever.
  
• its a wall of scribbles Exploring the process. Watch me work.
  
• its a mobile made from wires and dribbles of trash Insert tedious statement here.
• Its an 18 ton toy firetruck, enlarged from it’s original 1/72 scale.

The list goes on for quite a bit. We’ve only had thirty years to get up a head of steam on this.

Here’s another good example: Damien Hirst’s “Paracetamol”. The bad news: a complete re-rendering of a generic British pharma label. The good news: He sold it to Marc Jacobs.

Antidotes

For a visual refutation of the Post-Modern Art operating code, I present “Madame X” by John Singer Sargent.

This is not the only example—there are many, not limited to painting either. It just happened that I saw this masterpiece on the heels of looking at a lot of weak PoMo crap over a long Xmas vacation. Best thing that happened in a long time.

Here’s what makes this work magnificent.

• the work was complete
• there is evidence of craft, concept and execution, including a title.
• there was no “support” materials, ie brushes used, lists of paints, take-out orders etc
• no gaseous Artist’s Statement

Academy of Code Talkers

When I was in design school I spent a lot of time in the stacks, researching. Sooner or later, you go cross-eyed and I got up and wandered around. One day I pulled the “Proceedings of the Korean Worker’s Party Plenum: Pyongyang, 1972″ off the shelf. I started reading it. It was an impenetrable jig-saw puzzle of interlocking code-words, jargon, and heirophantic reference points. Just like “Art In America”. The only difference between the two was that “Art In America” was printed on heavy glossy paper, and had full-color pictures.

Now it all made sense. Both documents were designed to repel the outsider, baffle the scrutinizer, and reward the insider. The insiders in Art In America are the gallery owners. Their job is to shape the market by controlling the flow of product [bait] to the prospective patrons [fish].

There is nothing new in this. It is the eternal rhythm and cycle of perhaps the world’s third oldest profession. But it is new and evergreen every morning. Like true love, it has to be continually rediscovered. So perhaps you can now look at this squirrely mess for what it is, and decide if you need to accept it on the terms that its being presented to you.

Using A Useful Bullshit Detection Protocol

ArtSpeak is found in various places [print, gallery walls, etc]. It is best read aloud in one of two voices: (old-school) Daffy Duck/Sylvester the Cat; or New Jack (Eric Cartman). Either of these voices are highly effective Bullshit Detectors. Watch jargon, Latinates, and situational boilerplate melt away like a fumbled sno-cone on a summer day.

Accidents That Should Happen

If a toy piano fell out of a ten-story window and hit Chris Burden in the head, and hopefully killed him, would this be a worthy performance piece? The short answer is yes, it cannot happen soon enough. Unfortunately, there are many other deserving recipients, and not enough toy pianos. This would be Retail Darwinism, where wholesale solutions are called for.

“The Poseidon Adventure” is a convenient model. “Airport” is another. And since Post-Modern Art is the target, let’s go with Airport. The goal is to fill up a 747, or an Airbus 320—doesn’t matter which. I’m sure you’ll have some Deserving Candidates. Email me.

Leading the pack, in the Ambassador Lounge:

Jenny Holzer
Chris Burden
Jeffrey Koons

…you get the idea.

The jet fills up. Then it takes off. Somewhere over the Atlantic, shit happens. There is on-board drama and pathos. It disappears off the radar. Fox and CNN scramble to find Art Experts in their Golden Rolodexes to Explain It All. If there are a few accidental blondes on board, all the better.

Cut away to footage of search parties combing the ocean for remains. The gallery owners and other syndicate fixers are privately elated and panicked—their product suppliers have vanished. Fortunes collapse or expand overnight.

Now What?

The bad news is that this art form is an easy expression of the culture we live in. In case you have any doubts, rent “Idiocracy”. In the larger culture, “American Idol” is in it’s 6th season, celebrating inept mediocrity (as if there was an adept form). The necessary prophylaxis to “Idol” can be found here. Miss Teen South Carolina shared her knowledge of world geography with the world here. And John McCain is confused about who’s doing what in Iraq, nothing a few JDAMs wouldn’t fix. Let Gawd sort ‘em out.

In the final opinionated analysis, I think that these offenders are deeply afraid of their own shadows, and their own hearts. I’ll go further and posit that most of them are terrified of growing up and becoming mature adults.

Its a good thing that firemen and EMTs aren’t cut from the same cloth.

Some days the glass is not half anything.

A Prelude to a Client Meeting

Several weeks ago I found myself looking down a steep ice chute in the San Gabriel Mountains. The view was between my legs while front-pointing in a pair of snowshoes with teeth under the toes. My heels were in thin air.

I was in the middle of a glazed, frozen 45-degree slope, a blank 50′ stretch. All that was keeping me on this face were my sticky gloved fingertips, a lowered center of gravity, and by me very daintily chipping out toeholds. One foot at a time. Step. Chip-chip-chip. Transfer. Repeat.

Puts a day at work into perspective.

This wasn’t the first time I’d been in this situation. Once stupid, Twice idiotic. “I will never, ever, leave my ice-axe home again…”. I had to hear myself say it.

The slanting face I was on would get slushy down to the trail bed sometime in May. There were no manzanita bushes, tree roots, rock outcroppings to hang on to like I’d had in the last two miles. Here, I was naked—this was the crux move of the entire outing.

The steep north-west facing chute dropped several hundred feet out of sight into Wikiup Canyon. If the first twenty feet didn’t kill me, the last three sure would. The intervening seconds would be my last vivid memories of this coil.

I made it to safety, and contoured downwards on the trail in the sunshine. Along the way I saw day-hikers slushing up the trail from the Angeles Crest Highway.

That episode was relevant at a meeting several days later.

The Hypothetical Job Presented

I was contacted by a firm looking for a catalog specialist. Their website showed that they definitely were not bottom-feeders. It looked promising.

Meeting with the prospective client revealed the following information:

• Due to unforseen circumstances, the original designer had left halfway through the project.
• The project was supposed to be printed and done six weeks prior the meeting I was sitting in.
• The sample visual shown was the touted as ‘best of the worst’. This image alone would require extensive retouching to clean up sloppy masks, backgrounds, color balancing.
• There were 170 other images of unknown condition.
• The target for these troubled images was to be a very glossy, high-end coffee-table sized high retail book, where all the faults of each image would be available to intense scrutiny.
• There was no clear future print date or time-line, but there were intensely heightened expectations of delivery.

The Meeting Crux Move

My intuitions about this project were not good. Only 10% of an iceberg is visible. Mr Murphy typically lives below the waterline. As much as I was intrigued by this project, I remembered looking down that ice chute.

I looked the Prospective Client in the eye.

“I do not want to disappoint you, but I have to tell you straight out the way I see this project”.

• Client expectations about print dates are going to have to be set aside to execute this job properly.
• A high-end book is no place to rush anything. There are too many things that will go wrong. I can guarantee it, despite our best efforts.
• This is a project that would realistically engage a studio or design firm for a good chunk of time.
• The ‘best of the worst’ image alone looked like it needed a good 8 hours, and there are 169 unknowns waiting in the wings.

When I finished, the Prospective Client looked at me with a steady gaze. I’m sure that my assessment was not what they wanted to hear that day. They had voiced the Rosiest Possible Scenario. That’s what they do. And it’s my job to provide the most honest, realistic assessment. If you have cancer, do you go to Cedars-Sinai or Dr Phil?

Furthermore, ever been in a room with a client who is frothing with rage because you gave them a lollipop assessment to get the job? And then it went south? It’s up to you, bucko.

I passed on that job. In that instance I would have been in way over my head. There wasn’t enough protection from the exposure. It put my front-pointing episode into perspective.

The piñata ritual can offer an unsentimental analysis of life.

Once Upon A Time, Like When I Was Getting Into All This

In 1991 Quark was King Bee, the True Faith. Quark was also Old Testament: inscrutable, implacable, and inflexible. The Holy Writ that came with it in The Big Box was unreadable. I had better luck deciphering North Korean Presidium documents back in 1975.

It was the only game in town. Over the years I looked long and hard into Quark’s Dark Heart, and kept hearing Ella Fitzgerald singing “Ev’rything I’ve Got”:

Something beats in his chest,
But it’s just a pump at best.

It would tank. Fonts would corrupt. The monitor would flash the dreaded “#39: Unexpected End of File Encountered”. There went your afternoon.

Saving frequently was essential and habitual. And I got very good at reconstructing lost documents, always under deadline.

Asking arcane questions on various QuarkLists involved a lot of dial-up if you were away from the office. The answers might as well have been recorded on a quipu somewhere. These Lists’ main traffic was “uh… how do I do extra leading on the end of a paragraph?” or colorful in-group flames by a select Kool Kids Klub. So in the end I learned Quark from old-school typographers and endless self-tutoring.

Trying to get answers out of Quark Support was futile. If you worshiped remote gods, or had grown up with an absent parent; this was for you. The other part of that dialectic was that people still had the notion that the Mac was the center of a warm, fuzzy community, and you could just hang out and ask questions. No, Quark made it clear that it was all commerce, all the time. No group hugs from them, only a reach-around.

After a while, enough people got tired of all that. They’d had also gotten past the notion that software companies were Your Friend.

Gathering Evolutionary Developments

Adobe had built its everlasting fortune on the Acrobat PDF platform. PDFs had become integral in government, corporate, and other bureaucratic structures. Illustrator and Photoshop were small slices of the revenue-stream. But here was a chance to crack into the page-layout game.

Sometime in 1998 or so, Adobe inhaled PageMaker, retired it, and then retooled it as InDesign 1.0. Nope—not ready for prime-time. It still had a long way to go. They went back to the drawing board and came up with ID1.5.

The training-wheels were off, and it was free-wheeling, but still wobbly. Further refinements yielded IDCS2, and that’s where it really took off.

Adobe had pulled off a similar evolutionary leap with Illustrator. AI3 was similar to AI88 with a dopey interface and limited features. Freehand held the face cards in that bout, despite its weird twin-file set-up, arcane font-handling and rendering, and other features I’ve mercifully forgotten. But Adobe retooled AI3 into AI5 where the font-handling became cleaner. Freehand’s days were now numbered.

The primary hurdle for InDesign were the service bureaus. They’d just gotten used to the peculiarities of Quark, Illustrator, and Photoshop. They were just not interested in a Freehand-like golem raising hell in their shops. And if they weren’t placated, there was no future for the program.

Adobe cleaned it up.

The Evolving Technology Platform

Without getting into a lot of ur-weenie speak, the infrastructure got larger, faster, and more surefooted.

For instance: in ‘91 my IIfx was the Mac Daddy. It had (brace yourself) a 100mb hard drive! 4mb RAM! And when I up bought a 16mb RAM upgrade, it cost $600. Like heroin—it was hand-delivered in a glassine package.

In ten years the hard drives were now in Gigs, the ram was closing on on a gig, processors blew the doors off their predecessors, and the ZipDisk was the new mega-floppy. Memory and hard-drive prices had fallen through the floor.

The new machines could now handle full-resolution high-rez files, whereas in 1992 we did outputs and pasted them onto boards, still with FPO’s. It reminded me of the hybrid ironclad full-sail brigantines with side-wheel paddles.

Finally, the introduction of OS X ditched what hadn’t worked well, eliminated the “march of the inits” on start-up, and stabilized matters considerably.

Quark vs. InDesign: Real World

My job as Mr Pre-Flight at the Workbook gave me a window seat of the changing landscape. I kept track of the files as they came in and traveled through the system.

This was the file breakdown in 2004:*

1. 350 Quark
2. 231 Photoshop
3. 221 InDesign
4. 156 Illustrator
5. 2 FreeHand

By 2007 the file numbers* had shifted considerably:

1. 304 InDesign (v.2-IDCS3)
2. 254 Photoshop (v.7-CS3)
3. 134 Quark (v.4, 6 & 7)
4. 132 Illustrator (AI9-AICS3)

*Does not reflect actual page counts.

Obviously InDesign CS was eating Quark’s lunch.

I used an InDesign proofing doc to flight-check and laser-proof massive files from rep groups, who’d built their pages in Photoshop or Illustrator. It was the simplest way to import multiple formats, check for crossovers, check bleed, DPI, the works.

The Giant Rubber Lizards Do Battle!

OK, this is what you’ve been waiting for. This feature review is completely unscientific, subjective, incomplete, capricious, and arbitrary.

Quark: Plus…

• QXP has the benefit of better key-commands than IDCS—by virtue of being first and locking them in as intellectual property. I also attribute this to its typographer roots.
• In-line text boxes anchored to either the baseline or cap height.
• Consolidated menus, unlike the menus that blight the IDCS experience.
• Collect for output.

and Minus:

• Utterly inflexible column guides.
• Limited image import options: Tif, jpeg, and eps only.
• No bleed and slug presets. You could specify a wider print area beyond the doc bleed, but that was it.
• QXP5 had the crappiest PDF driver, ever. If it felt like making them. They fixed it in QXP6, sort of, but was blighted by leisurely output times.
• QXP7 pdfs are still 2x the size of ones generated thru Distiller. However, generating a PostScript file in Quark was very good. Then Adobe Distiller would take care of the rest. I lay this at the feet of the PDF driver in the Quark software.
• The lo-rez preview in Quark was unpardonable. That’s why a lot of people who should know better did ads in Illustrator.
• Standalone Xtensions that had to accompany the file to service bureaus, and be bonded to their software. As much fun as a leech.
• No pre-flight capacity. But neither did Photoshop or Illustrator, makes that a 3-way tie to the doghouse.
• No layers in versions 3-6. I haven’t looked at QXP7 recently.

InDesign: Plus…

• Image import options included PSDs. Of course your processor will grunt processing all those layers too. These habits will become fatal in long-form documents.
• IDCS has the proprietary Acrobat Distiller engines—big snaps up for that. Cooking off a PDF is a straight shot through the proverbial goose. Very clean, few cut-outs.
• Hi-rez preview
• Bleed and slug pre-sets
• Adjustable column guides
• Layers

and Minus:

• The designer “menu-puller” interface. Obviously a pick-up from Photoshop and Illustrator, but these are not page layout programs. I find them fragmentary and scattered.
• Keyboard commands: Yes, you can hot-rod the menus with QXP commands, but you are again lost when you find yourself at another machine.
• Do the palettes have to be so freakin’ tiny? Advantage Quark.
• Preflight feature only checks the presence/absence of an image, not whether it is print-worthy. People, you can do better.
• The ability to copy and paste EPS files into a layer. In the hands of a lazy operator, bad news. Why? Because it won’t show up in a pre-flight scan, and if you have to modify it you get to find it, replace it, ad nauseum. Hint: make an AI file out of it, then import it.
• In-line text & picture boxes have a seemingly vague way of floating/drifting in the line they’re pasted in on. This is where Quark’s rigidity can be described as “vertebral”
• The picture boxes with the 2 aspects: the frame edge and the imported image. A hangover from AI.

That is the promised arbitrary summary of these two tools. Yes, tools—not lifestyles or religious choices.

Drawing Conclusions

The technological landscape has changed completely in the last twenty years. Getting answers is much easier with broadband access. You can download software and whatever else you need 24/7. Buy it this afternoon and get it tomorrow. I like where its at now much better.

I also wouldn’t count Quark out yet. They may pull their heads out of their ass and completely redefine the tool paradigm. In the meantime, learn the tool in front of you, and learn it well. And be ready to jump when the Giant Rubber Lizards Battle for Total World Domination.

Hammer and anvil at work. Autry Museum, Summer 2004.

Education has been on my mind a lot recently.

Earlier I mentioned that late one night in 1997, I got fed up with being fed up, and that eventually led me to Mike Whitlow’s Bookshop. It took a lot more than a casual “gee, I think I’ll, like, go to night school, and…like, you know, work on my book…?

I had crashed into the side of the professional mountain. Completely. My Dick-n-Jane book was a symphony of tin cans tied to my tail. Every piece screamed AMATEUR BARNEY. Not surprisingly, I wasn’t getting any art direction work. I was getting a lot of horrifed looks.

In desperation I begged an appointment with Adrienne Lowe, one of my Art Center at Night teachers. I showed up early. She took one look at my book and curtly told me to “broom at least half of what’s in there”

As in “throw overboard”.

You cannot imagine my relief. It did suck! What a load off!

I thanked her profusely, left her office, and renewed my professional links with temp agencies. I wanted every shop that had seen that crappy book to completely forget they’d even heard of me. Ever.

Now I had a burning reason to get past that. And a copywriter I knew told me about the Bookshop.

The first Bookshop class I sat in on in late winter 1998 had me hooked within an hour. But I was holding out for additional evidence.

The next week I went to the 1998 International Student Show, hosted by the LA Creative Club. I was floored. The Bookshop took about 40% of the prizes, including Best of Show. Ahead of Art Center, Portfolio Center, VGA, Creative Circus, NYU. All this from a peripatetic night-school operation that met in an agency conference room once a week.

Now I had 2 big hooks in my mouth, and I was swimming for deep water.

From the git-go, writers and art directors were teamed up by assignment. Mike would hand out creative briefs. Typically we’d crunch through three projects in the course of the twelve week term.

The classes were a cross-section of designers, art directors, copywriters, post-college types, character actors, ex-70’s punk musicians, AE’s, some debutantes and poseurs who hadn’t tumbled yet, ex-service post-GI Bill vets, and working production professionals like myself. Everybody in the room was hungry. Everybody wanted to buid a book and get outta whatever dead-end they were in.

It was an intensive flame-off process. Concepts had to stand up to critical scrutiny, and frequently the slings and arrows of your peers. Nothing was sacred. I burned through more crap and dead-wood in my inventory than I imagined. Finally the decent concepts and executions began to emerge.

This also applied to working relationships. Some people didn’t understand that Mike was replicating the agency structure. Have a problem with your partner? The smart choice was to work out any personal beef behind closed doors and get through it. I’m sure people went to Mike over the years with one ache or another. I’m also sure he took notes. Maybe not.

Bottom line: the client doesn’t care about your problems, you are there to solve their problem. Oh.

And so it went for the better part of two years. When I finished in March 2000, I was exhausted. I’d gotten my equivalent of an MFA. More importantly, I had a marketable book. I got that art director job I’d wanted for so long.

That lasted as long as it needed to. I was laid off 10 weeks after 9/11. The ad business was in a tail-spin. I also remember looking out the window and seeing new Escalades on the dealer lot near the office. I thought Detroit had lost its mind. They did, but the blow-back took six years to hit for them.

Its been several years since I was an art director. However the education I got from the Bookshop has proved highly useful in other areas of my work and life. Thanks again. I continue to use it to this day.

Game face courtesy of Glenn Mitchell, summer 2004.

There’s an anedote I keep coming back to.

I had a prof in design school named Larry Simpson. A real hard-ass. Larry, wherever you are, I hope you are as core as you were back in the day. He told me an important story, which I’ll get to eventually.

The sophomore undergrads typically hated Simpson. Too hard. Not nice. Translated: not indulgent of whatever solipsism was current.

First assignment was given out on a warm September Monday morning. A week later, there were a class of spanked poodles. Everyone’s first efforts had been x-rayed and found completely wanting. I was right in the first rank of the Newly Chastened.

We quickly found out that illustration is a serious business. You rendered it right the first time. White-out was cake-frosting, a scorn magnet. As the class worked through the assignments, it began to lose the flab. People’s work started getting more muscular.

He threw different techniques at us: pencil, markers, color, stipple, pen and ink, the works.

Assignment concepts were a mind-benders. His favorite was Erotica. He showed us some of his stuff—think Helmut Newton with a very sharp 2B pencil. Sultry, icy long-legged, high-heeled vixens in garter belts squatting precariously over sharp pyramids while SS guards restrained snarling Dobermans. The paper was immaculately white, shadows were black, and there were no smudges anywhere.

The class was stunned into a deeper silence than normal. He reminded us that the assignment was full color, and coolly suggested that Hallmark Card soft-focus was for losers. But if you had to…whatever. Class dismissed.

I staggered out thinking “Now what?” What did I directly knew about erotica?

“Isolde burst into the stable, her dark hair disheveled from her sprint. The sudden arrival startled Obelisk, the prize stallion cross-tied in the aisle. Rugbert had his back turned to the doors whilst brushing him down. Isolde’s perfumes wafted across the stallion’s nostrils, and he reared up on his massive hind legs, eyes flashing and trumpeting his surprise. His mane caught in a gust, rippling in the afternoon light, echoed the snorting and trumpeting ringing from the rafters”

Ask a hungry man who’s only read cookbooks to describe eating a roast goose. My experience inventory was slight. This called for flat-out comedy.

So I went home and started a woodblock print on a scrap of 1 x 12 x 13″ softwood board. I lived in a continual construction project as my dad and his wife built their dream house and horse barn. And since I lived at home, that was free, in a manner of speaking.

I sketched out a comic scene: a shaggy satyr, mincing on an Arcadian meadow. In the background was a Greek column, with cypress trees. The satyr had a loopy toothy grin, beefy muscular arms, two limp wrists, and a raging phallus. And directly in front of the raging phallus was a panicked chicken, flapping its wings for dear life, tail-feathers fluttering in the air.

Monday morning all of our work was up on the crit rail. Everybody was awkward and oblique. This was a sore and tender nerve being plucked.

Larry walked in, and began to survey the work. He examined all of the pieces, matted to varying degrees of competence. He stops in front of my piece, studies it and then turns and faces me.

“…This is…obscene!“

I’m stunned. Obscene? Him? Me?

“Uh, Larry…you’re the one who’s got naked chicks squatting on pyramids!”

The class guffaws.

“You got the assignment, but you forgot this was to be in full color! I’m dinging a grade level for that!”

Damn. Guess I could’ve hand-tinted it. I got tunnel-vision on that one—not the first or last time. So I got a “B”. And I loved him for it.

Coda

Much later he told me the story I mentioned earlier.

He had a prof at the Art Institute of Chicago. Old-school man in his sixties, VanDyke beard, Mr Punctual. All work was to be on the crit rails by o755. He came in at 0800, locked the door behind him. Woe to you if you were late.

He’d light a cheroot, and silently begin at one end of the class. He’d examine each of the works until he reached the end. Then he’d turn around, and begin to flick the works he didn’t want to look at on the floor. Silently. Then at the end, he’d turn around and begin to critique the ones that were left. And flick cigar ash on the floor.

When Larry finished, I found myself wishing there were about ten more of him in the Department. But I didn’t know why for many years. This bygone prof was cueing his students that art school was also a vocational school. And they were going into a harsh business. He was doing them a favor.

Now What?

I think about that a lot when I go into various shops. Or have a squalling can of worms blow up in my face. There have been times when it all was going to hell and the only thing that saved me was the harsh experience I’d had earlier where I’d learned that I could get it done. It’s an inescapable part of the business. Most of it cannot be taught, only learned. And Larry’s prof was a lonely exception.

Color proofs are typically examined under the color-corrected lights of a proofing booth. The faithful assume that all proofing booths are identical. They are not. And neither are monitors. They are approximations.

Where do you look at color? I’m not talking about just proofs here—but the finished product. I’ll bet its on your sofa, maybe outside, in your office or kitchen; anywhere except in the even stabbing death-light of a proofing booth. Welcome to the real world.

Chasing the Dragon

Not too long ago I went into a small agency that had a big problem. The printed ads they had designed didn’t look anything like their proofs. The owner was sweating, as this was their Big Client.

We went through a list of culprits that could originate in the agency:

• unprofiled Photoshop source images
• un- or mis-profiled layout documents (here it was Quark 7)
• monitors in and out of calibration
• checking the profiles of the exported pdfs
• looking at the RIP choices on the Epson 9600, using the ColorBurst rip.
• possible color shift in the proofing paper

As I pulled test proofs, it became clear once we’d tightened up Quark, the color proofs looked pretty much like the source data. I say pretty much, because photons gunning out of a monitor and and a dithered proof are two dissimilar environment. Note: it always looks good on your monitor.

Now came the fun part. According to what I was seeing, the agency was sending accurate color to the pub. And the pub was hosing the agency.

The proof was in the same ad printed three days apart. Friday’s ad was yellow. Monday’s ad was red. A closer examination of both issues showed that the respective red and yellow contamination ran throughout the entire book.

Nice. Now the tail was wagging the dog. The anxiety was compounded by the fact that clients typically do not look at the entire book—they only look at their ad. And if the color visibly sucks, it becomes your problem.

Calls were made to the pub production manager, and the ensuing silence was disconcerting. Part of my job was to tell the agency that the pub was responsible for this wretched color. This is cold comfort when your proof is weighed against the tonnage of printed issues out there. Because in a perverse way, the bad color is more authoritative.

Fortunately the owner was a smart guy, and realized in his bones that setting up a color profile to match a wandering pub’s was not a realistic option. If the color was consistently red, different story. He then called the client, and the client was realistic. They knew that the pub was a rag in every respect except the prices they charged to run the ad. That was world-class. It was an unfortunate part of doing business in a closed trade environment.

A Color Proofing Environment of Note

In 1973, I was a lucky young guy, touring the Flor de Partagas cigar factory in Havana, Cuba. Towards the end of the tour we came to a cigar-sorter’s closet-sized workspace. The sorter’s job was to sort a never-ending stream of like-typed cigars (Coronas, Panatelas, Churchills, etc) by the color of the wrapper. They ranged from greenish black on the left to a tawny tan to the right. When she had twenty of the right range, they went into a waiting box. And so on.

She proofed her color under a weak fluorescent tube. The walls were painted an elderly lime-green. Yes, the fluorescent is also heavily blue-green, the walls don’t help, but all the color was range-consistent when it left her cubbyhole. This was a stable proofing environment. Her choices held up once they were boxed.

The Ghost Is The Machine

Edward Tuffte and Peter Norvig have done brilliant dissections on PowerPoint with all its attendant content distortions. David Byrne has also taken a chilly look at it, and found it appropriately ironic. I find no irony in PowerPoint. Only a burning, passionate hatred.

I reserve a lesser dislike for MS Word. Its shortcomings are misdemeanors to PowerPoint’s felonies. In the production realm, most matters of content have already been adjudicated. So I’ll confine myself to the below-the-decks, boiler-room procedural dynamics of working with these blighted text-shapers.

The Greater Evil

PowerPoint is a digital Fisher-Price tool kit turned loose on a construction site. It has a cute yellow saw, with 4 round friendly teeth. It also has a cute red hammer. However the saw don’t cut, the hammer don’t drive. But it replicates itself with ease, pages and slides that bludgeon all in its path to moronic stupidity—kinda like Barney.

After 16 years of Quark, I knew too much. I had to take retardo pills to bring me back to the basic level of design & conceptual incompetence to work the PowerPoint levers. Like other incarnations of BillyWare®™ (with the possible exception of Excel), it begs to be noticed. In addition, it has a pre-fab, pre-chewed, clunkiness about it.

That is merely the application aspect.

A PowerPoint doc arrives into your workspace, borne by the account guy/gal who will want it imported into a document/leave-behind/chart. The designer or art director groans, and they’re backing away as fast as possible from this happy-footed tar-baby that has wandered into their midst.

The account people are puzzled/miffed and profoundly indifferent to your suffering. Just—Make—It—Work. Exit, stage right, with their “Triple Westside White Girl” No-Foam Drive-Thru Coffee beverage.

Thanks. Deadlines loom.

The first order of business is to get with the art director/designer to divine the intentions and manifestations of the originator. Extracting content is not a simple question of cut-n-paste. If it was, like transit-mixed concrete, the first plop out of the chute would be identical to the last splat.

How much of this weird formatting is really necessary? Are all these bullet points necessary? Why do sentences get chopped up?

When these questions are posed to the document donors, most of them shrug, say “…oh” and are generally stuck for an answer. Here’s a hint: they don’t know either. Its like drinking Cosmos. You kinda know its bad for you, but it goes down so easy. Watch them at the next office party.

When all else fails, appeal to the intellectual vanity of the author, and subtly suggest that their brilliance is not being well served. Occasionally, it works. And everybody is somewhat happier. This way a lot of stylistic cheez can be ditched so it won’t taint the overall presentation. After all, the agency is trying on some level to present a shaped view.

Nothing Except The Words.

I have a similar skepticism about MS Word. It’s a word-shaper, not a design/layout program. In my jaundiced opinion, it should have 2 fonts, in three iterations (roman, bold and ital), in one point size. No boxes. No columns. Period.

And once upon a time, it used to be that way. It came from an IBM Selectric II.

Another Ancient History Diorama

Perhaps some of you saw this at the Renaissance Fair in a re-enactment. Bear with me.

During the Last Golden Age Of Advertising, a copy deck would show up on the designer/art director’s desk. This was also the time when phones rang, there was linoleum in the hallways, and people smoked in their offices. And more than a few had bottles tucked away in desk drawers.

The lucky designer or art director would get out the copy-casting ruler, and go to work. Mark up the text, send it out, and then the type house would get it back to you in 12 hours or so. Look at the galley tissues, make edits, and then go to final. Or roll the dice, get lucky, and slap down the repro galleys on boards, and hope nobody screwed up.

Funny thing, though. Nobody really read type until money had been spent. I noticed this across the board—from small type houses to the big leagues. And it wasn’t cheap.

I knew a guy in 1978 who quit being a production artist, and went to work for a very prominent type house here in Los Angeles. Within six months he was off salary and living quite nicely on the commission. His golden route was the Miracle Mile on Wilshire Blvd, where most of the groovy and lush ad agencies were located.

Being a type salesman was a good way to get yourself into a Porsche 911 and an expanding waistline with the expense account lunches. Another type salesman I knew was dismayed when he found out that the Warner Brothers account we bought type for was being absorbed into the larger corporate portfolio. He wailed “I just closed on a new Carerra!”

Never mind that my partner and I were looking unemployment in the face. It was a harsh lesson on priorities.

Not everybody played ball though. I knew an art director who loved nothing more than to take the obligatory expense-account luncheoneer to La Luz De Dia over in East Los Angeles. La Luz was a 3-stool daytime taqueria with a day-laborer local vibe. The type salesman would be making sure the rojo or verde didn’t splat his tie while keeping an eye on the 911.

These good times came to a crashing halt by 1992. The major type houses here in Los Angeles either folded or reinvented themselves as service bureaus. And this is how you became a typesetter. Which brings us back to MS Word and Powerpoint.

Returning Again To His Dork Matter

Word and PowerPoint have “design” features to enable the design-illiterate to make presentations look cooler. Nothing helps a bad idea better than a gaudy effect. Often-times an alert production person can make sense of nonsense that has passed through the agency process unchallenged.

Its harder to think clearly than to just press “Print”.

A wise man once said “I’m going to teach you everything you know, but not everything I know”. Unfortunately, he was eight feet high in a movie theatre.

The following are observations about the print production, agency life, and work in general. Its organized into easily-ignored categories.

The Workday

• Everyone’s day ends at six, except yours. This explains the 5:59 dump on your desk by someone on their way home.
• When the word “Family” is uttered, be very careful. You already have a family (setting aside metaphysics for the moment)—everything else are associations.
• You can and will be thrown overboard—it’s the Family Way.
• People come to the Studio because its way more interesting than their veal-cube. They’ll want to play in traffic. Watch their little fingers near knives.

The Workflow

• Similar to a marathon—last files to arrive are the ones that are most screwed up. No, make that a destruction derby.
• Just because that art director or designer went to a name school doesn’t mean their files won’t be screwed up. Remember, they think they’re Frank Gehry—they get to dream, not to execute.
• The Inverse Law has many applications. The amount of misery generated by a client/account mgr/customer is inversely proportional to their understanding of the process.
• The file that has to be FedEx’d rush is the one that is missing something.

Human Relations

• Agency life revolves around Three Constants: Who’s Cool or Not, This Season’s Fad Gadget, and Who’s Doing Who. This was found taped under David Ogilvy’s desk.
• Stay on good terms with the support staff and Accounts Payable.
• 98.6% of office romances end badly. Don’t ask about the other 1.4%. Wait until that special someone works somewhere else, then let it rip.
• Your problems suck.
• A good joke lasts forever.
• Get an outside life.
• Beware of utopian office schemes that get breathless write-ups in design magazines. Make note who’s got an office with a locking door. Also check to see if there’s adequate ventilation and work surfaces—you are going to be putting together those comps.

The Client/Customer

• They’re paying the freight.
• Explain complicated things concisely. Give them a reason to consult you.
• They know things you don’t. Maybe you’ll learn something.

That’ll do for now.

I pulled the original from a plywood board-up on Melrose Ave. here in LA in 1989. It was an instant classic.

Over the years I’ve had it in the various offices I’ve occupied. Mainly its been enjoyed. One middle-manager stuffed-shirt at Grey Advertising huffily insisted I take it down, as The Client was going to be in the Office on a Tour.

Right. I made a note to Min-Wax the oar I was seated at.

The best reaction was from a cool account-trainee who looked at it, and told me that a friend of his had made t-shirts using the exact same art. And that this was the first time he’d seen it anywhere else.

Chris, wherever you are, you’ve brought seconds of pleasure to countless ad professionals.