Work is progressing quite well... The week leading up to the Easter weekend is typically a rather fraught one in the Publishing business. It's a short week (actually a pair of short weeks, one before Easter, one after) and, somehow, deadlines always conspire to overlap during this period. My employers, between my time there as a temp and my acceptance of a permanent position, have altered their deadline structure such that all magazines have a specific - numbered - press date every month. That is to say, one magazine might be published on the 15th of every month, unless that date falls over the weekend, in which case it falls back to Friday (from Saturday) or forward to Monday (from Sunday). In theory, the idea is sound... and it can work in practice... as long as you don't have all your deadline dates following directly on from one another.
Now, granted, my employers have several monthly titles, several bi-monthlies and several periodicals, so it's rare for all deadlines to fall in the same week... But anyone with a passing familiarity with Murphy's Law will know that circumstances will conspire to ensure that all the deadlines will fall in the same week whenever there's a short week, whenever a portion of the team is/has been on holiday, and whenever the team is bedding in a couple of newbies.
So what happened this week is that I had a press day on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and my counterpart had deadlines on Tuesday and Thursday. I took one look at this week's schedule and decided to put in some extra time last Friday, staying till almost 7pm to ensure I'd cleared as much as possible for Monday's deadline. This turned out to have been an excellent plan... though I found out on my second press day that I'd made a rather huge error. Or maybe that was irrelevant. More on that later.
Even though most of my work for Monday was completed on Friday evening, the first couple of days of the week were still pretty hectic (not compared to my previous permanent job, but certainly compared to my temping assignments). Having had plenty of experience of that sort of situation stood me in good stead, though, and things went quite smoothly. Weirdly, the person I replaced in the team had complained about the way the Salespeople had become, suggesting a recent change for the worse, but I've yet to see any difference. Like all Salespeople everywhere, they are thoughtless beyond their own role (bringing in advertising). One simply has to make allowances for this. I've been warned against being 'too helpful' ("I know what you're like," said the Head of Department. "Yeah," I responded, "I'll do what I can to help... but I know that deadlines are there for a reason.") but, given the number of publications, the number of advertisers in each and the comparative smoothness of the days running up to press, it's easy enough to slot in a last-minute sale as long as the advertisement comes in complete, or uses artwork we already hold.
There was one amusing situation where a Salesperson had noted on a booking that the client wanted to see the final page their (quarter page) advertisement appeared on before we went to press. I pointed out how disturbing that idea was and that, in my not-inconsiderable experience, clients who asked for that particular service would be nothing but trouble. They'd ask to be moved away from a direct competitor. They'd ask for a better position on the page. They'd decide to send new artwork to better contrast with the other ads. I was assured that this was not the case, just that it had been the client's condition of booking.
Naturally, when the client saw the final page, they weren't happy.
Granted, I sent them a low-resolution proof of the final page, rather than something press-ready... But why would the client need anything more? They know what their high-resolution artwork looks like (hell, it was created in Photoshop... it's not as if some of the text was going to go missing), and I cannot think of a single good reason to allow them to have the high-resolution artwork of their competitors' ads. I explained this to the salesperson when she relayed the complaint... and, shortly thereafter, I was told the client "may be sending new artwork".
Yeah. I called that one.
Throughout the week, because I am who I am (specifically, Office Fascist, firm believer of the idea that those who work in a particular field should have more than a basic working knowledge of that field, with a very specific idea of what constitutes 'common sense' and the ability to pick up my own mistakes long before anyone else (again, more on that later) and thereby make everything appear easy, seamless and, above all, Right First Time) I was keeping half an eye on my counterpart, trying to figure out how he got the slightly more senior of the two roles. Granted, I've only worked with him for five days, only four of them consecutive and none of them 'ideal' due to the conflicting deadlines... but he just doesn't seem that good. He output a PDF of a house advertisement and wasn't able to determine why it had no bleed when the original InDesign document had been set up with bleed. It turned out that the document settings had bleed listed as 0mm (ie. none)... but, even then, it's perfectly possible to include bleed in the final output by unchecking the 'Use Document Bleed Settings' option in the print/export dialogue box and manually adding the required value. He complained a couple of times about preferring Mac systems but, having worked on both, I can honestly say there are no practical differences in the way the software works, and most of the disadvantages - in my humble opinion - are with the Mac. Not least, why the fuck would I have to tell the directory windows that I want mounted network volumes available everywhere, not just on the desktop? And then, why should it be so much trouble to add such a network volume to my 'Favourites' or any other of the utterly redundant filing options for available drives/volumes/etc? In short, why aren't they just there?
While I had my suspicions, back in January/February, as to why I was not selected for the role, I'm forced to conclude that all of my conspiracy theories were wide of the mark (I do have a new conspiracy theory, though: one of the questions I was asked in the interview was about whether or not I was into Classical Music or Performing Arts in any way... and I confessed my general ignorance of both, while this guy comes across as a little bit arty-farty, possibly Music Hipster-ish). The guy clearly doesn't have my experience, but he's also not utterly useless. He seems efficient enough (though I did do more than half of his copy-chasing - as well as my own - while he was away, so make of that what you will), pleasant enough, and will no doubt continue to learn (while he was away, the head of department actually told me at one point "I think he could learn a lot from you", and I managed to stop myself pointing out that it's traditional for the senior member of staff to be the one doing the teaching, not the learning). I've no real gripes about his performance so far, other than taking two weeks holiday during his probationary period, and I'm certainly not complaining that I didn't get the more senior of the two roles because, frankly, the head of department can be a bit of a twit, and seems to make life difficult for virtually everyone at one time or another. I'm still confused by her decision, but I'm content in my role.
And, besides, I mentioned that huge error I made, right?
Right. So, there are two ways of making a PDF from InDesign. One is to 'Export' the other is to 'Print'. Personally, I favour the Print option. It first creates a PostScript file which is then converted into a PDF by Acrobat Distiller. Since PostScript for print doesn't really support such things as Transparencies, one can be certain that a printed PDF is properly flattened and ready for use. When Exporting a PDF, one must be sure of one's settings. During the job interview I mentioned in my last post, I was asked which PDF settings I use, and I had to ask if that was a trick question, because only PDF 1.3 is even close to a guarantee of 'print-readiness' (1.4 and above are more for on-screen presentation, and allow all kinds of fun extras). My employers have their own PDF settings which all seem good and logical (and produce version 1.3 output) so, by and large, that's what I tend to use for outputting single advertisements. When it comes to final page output, however, I prefer to print my PDFs.
For my first magazine of the week, I set up a document of all the advertising pages and printed them out using - I thought - my employer's Acrobat .joboptions settings. I had no reason to doubt it, after all, since those are the settings I chose within InDesign.
It later transpired - unfortunately on my second magazine of the week - that something had gone wrong. For no obvious reason, despite my choosing the house .joboptions within InDesign, the final output was neither full resolution, nor was it CMYK.
So I checked the settings on the dummy printer, Adobe PDF.
It was set to Standard. Standard is less than ideal resolution and RGB.
Thing is, even after I altered this, my printed PDF output has been... shall we say 'inconsistent'?
Being who I am, I made no secret of the fact that the PDFs I output for the first magazine of the week were possibly rubbish because something went horribly wrong with my output settings and, just for once, I didn't spot it in time. Annoyingly, there were tell-tale signs that something wasn't right, not least the Printers' caution that there had been a lot of RGB images in the materials we supplied. It hadn't occurred to me to doubt my output because I (thought I) had everything set up correctly. When one chooses specific output settings in InDesign, one does not expect them to be overridden by defaults. And when one alters the default to high-spec output, one does not expect the output to become patchy (for example, in a three-page document, pages 1 and 3 are fine, but page 2 has low-res images).
Suffice it to say, from here on, I shall grit my teeth and trust the 'Export' way of doing things, despite my preference for proper PostScript output. I am nothing if not adaptable and if my preferred method of output has now become unreliable, I shall embrace the alternative method until I have a new (or greater) cause to doubt it.
In other news, I know I've laboured the point somewhat that I don't particularly want to wax lyrical about my girlfriend in this blog (despite keeping it all reasonably anonymous), but there are times when something has to be mentioned.
Since she's currently on her Easter break from University, she spent a couple of weeks back home with her parents and we're currently trialling the concept of her moving into my place permanently for her next year at Uni. I shan't write about her experiences at home, because that's personal to her... But I will say (again?) that the weirdest thing about having her stay with me for a couple of weeks is that it just isn't weird... Even having lived here on my own for the few years after I bought the place and moved in.
To say we have a similar sense of humour, for example, would not do full justice to it. We're not (quite) one of those couples who finish each other's sentences but, if she suddenly starts giggling to herself, I can frequently (almost always) extrapolate what has amused her, without her uttering a single word of explanation... And it's usually because we're thinking exactly the same thing. The number of times one of us will deliver a pun or non-sequitur, and the other will say "I was just thinking that!" is a joy.
It seems to be good for her to stay with me because my place is comparatively neutral (or positive) territory, where both University digs and the family home seem to harbour some bad memories. It seems good for me because she is inspiring in many ways... I've been meaning to somewhat formalise my blogging time because of some comments she made in her own blog and because, really, why shouldn't I aim for (at least) one blog post a week? It's also good to come home to a hug and a kiss, rather than to my empty flat, the TV and the computer... And her presence in particular has been very comforting.
This weekend, we're hoping to do a bit of cooking together (another wonderful surprise - I tend to get uncomfortable when other people are in my kitchen... not so with her) and also popping out shopping (I have to get my sister a birthday present... though neither of us have much of an idea what just yet, and I'm hoping she'll send a suggestion or two over the weekend). With any luck, I'll buckle down to some other blogging (probably not here)... maybe even some sketching. I mean, come on, four days of weekend? It'd be a shame to waste 'em...
No comments:
Post a Comment