By now, most creative professionals in the digital world have heard about Adobe’s latest iteration of the Creative Suite Franchise. CS5 was unveiled last week and is scheduled to ship within the next four weeks.
As with previous releases of the software, purchasing new copies or upgrading old ones comes at a relatively stiff price. Many design studios are currently evaluating the new version to see if and when it is most prudent to make the jump.
Of course, everyone wants to stay at the cutting edge of the latest in technology and software tools. But in today’s difficult economic times, many companies cannot afford to do that. It may not make financial sense for studios and especially individuals to purchase every major upgrade that Adobe releases.
It can be argued that the last version of Adobe CS, version 4, was not a significant enhancement over the one before, version 3. Yes, there some new and interesting features. But was it worth shelling out several hundred or thousand dollars to bring workstations up to CS4 when CS3 was more than adequate?
In our case, at Intrigue, we did something a little different.
As someone who works with both especially large and numerous files on a daily basis, “storage” is a very important issue. Working in a design studio, you quickly see how important it is to have sufficient storage to hold ALL the “live” files AND for adequate backups.
Although we do archive (to DVDs) and delete older projects periodically, it is quite staggering how many gigs of information we currently have in active use. As the company IT guy at Intrigue, it is my responsibility to make sure we have the storage space that we need and that all critical files are backed up on a regular basis. This is no small task as more files are created than deleted on a regular basis. This means that over time, our storage needs will always continue to increase. That requires a plan of action.
A month ago Kodak sent out a press release about their new Nexpress printing press. This press has a very nifty feature that has not been seen before in the printing world. It’s a digital press that lays down what they call “Dimensional Clear Dry Ink”. It’s a special coating – like varnish, or gloss – that creates a raised printing surface to the printed piece.
It’s a 3d effect that you can feel with your fingers, which makes it unlike anything done before. Imagine a photo of an orange. With this new Nexpress and the Intelligent Dimensional Coating Solution, you can actually “feel” the dimples of the orange on the paper. If you hold the paper at an angle, you can see how the light reflects as if it were bouncing off a dimpled surface.
Recently, I wrote about our catalog project that required the usage of multiple metallic, spot color inks. It took some trial and error, but we got things set up correctly to do the workflow and the PDFs turned out ok.
At least so we thought! The printer has been working on processing our files the last couple of weeks and discovered a situation with one section of the catalog that was causing a problem. There were about ten, seemingly random pages in this section that were not separating correctly. They were all created in the same exact fashion with the same exact settings so it was very strange to hear this.
After we heard about the problem, I went to our workstations and verified all the settings just to be sure nothing had accidentally been flipped. But no, everything looked as expected. Nothing amiss anywhere. The settings in Quark were fine as were the settings in Distiller.
Today, Intrigue is giving a big business presentation. We have a meeting with a potential client that we would really like to work with on an ongoing basis. Actually, we’ve already done a few small projects for this client before, but we’re interested in diversifying and increasing the work we do for them.
The basic premise of the presentation is to show the client what we at Intrigue do, and more importantly, CAN DO. Sometimes, even when a person knows you, it can be very beneficial to prepare a small presentation to package your services and talents. Our client allowed us the opportunity to come in and “show our stuff”. It was a very welcome moment as it would be wonderful to be working with this account on a regular basis.
However, the problem was that we had less than a week to prepare the presentation and a budget of ZERO. Well, ok then! We’re a creative group – this should be straightforward. All we needed was a plan. So the idea was to create a slideshow with some of our best work.
Piggybacking on the multi-color PDFs we were generating for our last Intrigue project, there was a new challenge awaiting. Our latest catalog has a specification for 2 extra “colors” as well – though they are not actually colors, rather they are extra “plates”.
There will be a spot varnish plate as well as a “glossy” plate. By printing with both varnish and glossy coatings, the product images will really pop out from the printed page. It creates a very high-end look and people see the extra quality immediately.
We were successful in generating proper (and standard compliant) PDFs for the previous book, this time around, we need to approach things a little differently. Because the varnish and gloss plates are not actual colors, it’s necessary to convince Quark and Photoshop that we will be using colors anyway.
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