Production time savers - keeping up with magazine production schedules

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Annual, 1994 by Ed Abrams

Tips to help keep you on schedule.

A wise teacher once asked my class a question: "If you could hire one person, and you had the choice of a hard worker or a lazy worker, which would you hire?"

As we all knew, there was a not-so-obvious lesson to be learned here. When a classmate offered the answer we wanted to believe was correct, but knew wasn't -- the hard worker -- our instructor replied, "No! If you are smart, you'll hire the lazy person."

"Why?"

"Because," our teacher patiently explained, "if you give the hard worker a job to do, he will do his best to complete the job in his most earnest, hard-working fashion. But if you give the same task to a lazy man, he will try desperately to come up with an easy, quick way to get the job done."

At intervals during my years in magazine production, I have remembered this little parable. It comes to mind during all the late nights we production people spend catching up on deadlines that other departments have failed to meet; when pleading with printers and prep houses to accommodate impossible schedules forced on us by departments that can't make up their minds; in the midst of scrambling to find materials that were supposed to have arrived weeks before.

Thus, the ever-valuable, worth-its-weight-in-gold, sanity-saving production tip was born. Here are a few:

Get your art director and color separator to speak the same language. Succeeding at this task can mean saved time, money and peace of mind. How do you do it? Ask a representative from the separator's shop to set up an appointment with the art director when the color is being sent out. That way, the separator can write the instructions on the art before it is sent out to be scanned.

This gives the art director a better chance of getting what he or she wants on the first scan (and you won't end up paying in time and money for re-scans, dot etching or retouching), and it helps the art director learn the language of the scanner operator. Eventually, the separator and the art director will know exactly what the other expects -- and you will reap the rewards of good production planning.

Give your art department a list of your printer's capabilities. This tip is especially relevant if your publishing company routinely uses different printers for different jobs.

With the advent of desktop publishing, many printers are re-entering the prep area; however, many are not. Designers may assume that they can send a disk to a printer, or may assume the opposite. The only way to be safe is to tell your art people ahead of time if the printer you are working with can handle their material on a disk or modem.

Other problem areas to clarify: whether the printer has five- or six-color capability, or can do laminating or finishing work in-house.

By letting your art department know what the printer's capabilities are, you are letting the art department know what their limitations are (which may, in turn, help you decide to use a different printer or manufacturing facility).

Warn everyone about important incoming and outgoing packages. This includes the receptionist as well as the building's lobby guard (if you have one), and whoever might be relieving the receptionist during lunch and for breaks. If you don't know who that person is, write a note and place it at the receptionist's desk. It may sound like simple advice, but I know from experience that this is a tip that can prevent disaster.

Bring the sales team up to speed. Involving the sales team in the production process by giving them specs for inserts and gatefolds is another way to avoid a serious problem.

Unless told otherwise, salespeople might assume that the specs for inserts are the same as the standard page specs. An easy way to disabuse them of this assumption is to get the insert and gatefold specs from your printer and create annotated, sample pieces. Circulate them to the sales and art departments along with a memo that alerts them to the variations between inserts and run-of-book material.

Another way to involve the sales team: Consider circulating updated versions of paginations with date, four-color placement, form breaks and ad information in place.

Three more sanity-savers:

* Create page templates on positive film of your pages with rules for all ad sizes. This makes checking ad film for size fun -- almost.

* Start a production library. If you are like most production people, you are probably inundated with printing and paper samples, supplier lists, type books, articles about production, and so forth. Organize them all on a shelf (or shelves) for junior production people, or even non-production people, to use as reference material.

* Learn this rule of thumb: The bigger the form, the lower the cost. Someone asked me if it would be cheaper to print a five-color, eight-page and a four-color eight-page, or a five-color 16-page. My lazy-man's solution provided the answer. The bigger form was the least expensive to print.

Ed Abrams is director of manufacturing for K-III Information Co., Inc. He was formerly editorial production manager at Esquire.