Preflight Basics for Graphic Designers

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The preflight basics for graphic designers. Preflighting quality assurance checking for graphic designers. How to preflight your Digital files destined for print or even online use. In this educational overview, we cover the main reasons to preflight your Indesign, QuarkXPress, Illustrator, Photoshop and PDF layouts. David Dilling, product specialist at Markzware, the founders of this niche market with FlightCheck, also helps students understand the main preflight problems.

This is part of a larger series

An Introduction to Graphic Communication (www.igcbook.com), originally published in 2007 by PIA/GATF, has been completely revised and digitally enhanced. It is perfect for students, designers, and newcomers to the or world. The book includes online video content, including this segment from Markzware.

For more information on how you can preflight with software on your Mac, see:

PDF Preflight & file conversion for graphic design, print & archiving

Multi-purpose pre-flight applications such as Markzware’s FlightCheck, not only provide a quality control check for Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and QuarkXPress files, but can also do a double-check on the exported PDF or image files. Let’s call this last part a post-flight. This provides more confidence that the incoming print job is READY to proceed in your workflow or to be output by the printer to plate, or press.

Print PDF or otherwise, the key is the job input. This cannot be overemphasized and is imperative, so that the final product will not error-out in the back-end print workflow. Print quality in, print quality out.

Numerous items that are rarely considered include: hairline rules, overlapping layers, wrong color model, image resolution and even missing fonts. The preflighting process requires educating, not only yourselves, but perhaps other people in your internal and external workflow.

Preflighting needs to be initiated upstream, at the graphic design level. This may be accomplished by communicating and educating your print-shop regarding proper file preparation, to solidify quality control. Ask your print-shop for their requirements. No RGB, only CMYK colors? Effective image resolution above 300 dpi? Work with the printer to setup your FlightCheck Ground Controls (Preflight profiles) and ensure that everyone working on art for this print layout is adhering to these quality assurance aims.

FlightCheck is a multi award winning stand-alone application that will find most if not all of the most common preflight errors in design. As graphic designers we are not perfect. Use checking methods outlined in this video to help stop problems before they go to press and print.

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