What to look for when you visit a printer

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April, 1989 by Jeff Parnau

What to look for when you visit a printer

Selecting a printer is no easy task. Those who have been through the process can tell you (probably at length) of the perils and pitfalls. Those of you who haven't yet been initiated needn't feel intimidated, however.

One important step in the selection process is a visit to the printing plant (or plants). Educated observation can go a long way toward easing the task of selecting one printer over another. Therefore, this article will address just what it is you should be looking for when touring a printing plant.

The first step, of course, is to decide how many printers should you see. The absolute minimum is two. If you have never been to a printing plant of the type and size you are considering, you simply must see at least two, and it would not hurt to see a few more. The reason should be obvious: You need to compare plants, and you cannot compare one plant to itself.

Let's use Rule 1 (See more than one plant) to illustrate Rule 2: Cleanliness is king.

If you were to visit only one printing plant, you might think it looked a mess. Thousands of pieces of film on tables in the prep area, stacks of envelopes near a scanner, piles of orange-colored sheets in the plate area, and paper stacked from floor to ceiling. Look at a dozen more plants, however, and you may find you were mistaken about the first. What might have initially struck you as cluttered could in fact be the cleanest plant on the continent.

So before you eliminate a plant because it's dirty, you need to know what "clean" is. In this business, "clean" is a systematic way of storing, identifying and moving material without having chunks of it end up on the floor as scrap.

To take it further, "clean" is a comfortable working atmosphere. A paper cutter laboring in a dingy basement area with low ceilings may keep the scraps off the floor, but won't feel "clean." However, in an airy, well-lit work area (maybe with a window), that same paper cutter will feel better--and work better.

A clean plant, then, has two advantages: First, employees tend to feel better about their jobs, and therefore do a better job. Second, because printing a magazine requires a high degree of organization, orderly storage tends to ensure that pages 17 through 48 won't just disappear, and that your insert cards won't end up in the shredder instead of in the magazine.

After seeing a few plants, you can begin to trust your gut instincts on the question of sanitation. If you get bad vibes from the way a plant looks, you're probably right. Something's wrong.

Three in one

In the magazine world, printing is actually three distinct businesses, and each of those businesses has subdivisions. For starters, let's identify the three major areas as pre-press, press and finishing. . Pre-press: This includes anything that happens at a plant before the plates (or cylinders) for a given job are put on the press--obviously including making the plates themselves. But it can also encompass any, all or none of the following: typesetting, page assembly, camera work, scanning, stripping and proofing. Some printers prefer not to do any of these activities, because doing them inevitably involves creative people--who can make an otherwise simple job into a never-ending nightmare of remakes and alterations. If a printer prefers to avoid pre-press as much as possible, it probably has something to do with Whims of Iron (a quality frequently found in art directors and publishers). . Press: The second area, printing itself, can include web, sheetfed and gravure printing, and dozens of sub-specialties: lacquering, laminating ultraviolet coating and more. Presses might be one-color, on up to eight-or nine-color. . Finishing: This area reflects the needs of the pressroom. If the presses are all webs, the product is delivered to the finishing department already folded. If the presses are sheetfed, the finishing department must fold the product.

Typical equipment in the finishing area will include perfect binders, saddle binders, folders, counters, stackers, labeling machines, ink-jet machines, blow-in devices, cover feeders, cutters, tippers, trimmers--and lots of people.

the finishing department has one additional problem: Because they finish the product, they have no department to pass it to. They have to get rid of it. So the department either includes a shipping area, or a subdepartment called Shipping.

As you take your tour, what should you look for? Other than cleanliness and order, you look for things you might need. You don't look for a UV coater if you don't UV your covers, and you don't look for a perfect binder if you know your magazine will be saddle stitched until the sky falls.

But let me ask you an important question: Do you know what a UV coater looks like? For that matter, do you know what a perfect binder looks like? If you know what a piece of equipment does, and you need it, and it isn't in the plant, your tour has been worthwhile. If you see something, and you don't know what it does or whether you need it, you're wasting time.