Recognizing phenomenal change

Maybe I finally recognized the phenomenal change because of what I did that day.

That morning, the President of my company wanted to invite his top management team (all fifteen of them) to a nice dinner to thank them for their year's work. His wife had set-up the dinner, the invites were my-to-do. Within ten minutes, I had gone online picked out an invitation template, filled it in, selected a matching envelope and added our return address on the envelope. Everything, including shipping, came just under $24.

It was later that day, during the first of an Adobe Illustrator class that I had my epiphany.

A man introduced himself as printer. He spoke about proofs and how customers came in to his plant to view them, some having actually flown in to do so. The printer spoke about runs, saying he priced jobs so he never had to do anything under 1k. And he laughingly spoke about customers always wanting their jobs next week.

I must have been staring at the guy, cause he asked me what was wrong.

"I didn't know they did hard-copy proofs any more," was my reply.

That got a loud guffaw from the gentleman. As he chortled away any idea that you could print without hard-copy proofs. "Obviously," he conjectured, "you've never done quality printing."

From the endless lists of marketing collateral you print, an annual report is the only thing I can think of that I haven't done. So I've done more than my fair share of trots to the printers to view a proof, or hovering over a fax machine to check lay-out and wording, or opening a FEDEX package to view a crudely put together proof.

But it's been years since I've done so. And I'm not going back (I don't have the time). A PDF proof has worked just fine for me. It makes me wonder what I'm missing or more importantly what my collateral is missing from more scrupulous attention to prepress detail.

But then I think though what I've printed in the last four years. Through my online printers, I've printed posters, canvas artwork, brochures, flyers, overhead banners, large-scale tradeshow booth backgrounds, laminated point of sale material for my retailers, fruit labels, and now invites. I've made only a couple of complaints and each complaint was reprinted at no cost.

By the way, the invites just came in the mail. They look great. I'm going to have to save my receipt to prove I didn't pay a lot more.