Burning the midnight oil and sending it all off.

So some few days without a posting. Back to normal I suppose. Overall it went fairly smoothly this year. No last moment panics - although did get one advertiser wanting to make a change just after we had 35000 printed.

Got some time off to do things like sleep and eat but only just:

• Friday 12: worked all day and most of night. Bed about 6.00am
• Saturday 11: Worked all day from about 9.00am until about 16.30; then from about 20.00 through to 4.00am
• Sunday 12: Worked on guide 12.00pm through to 4.00am.
• Monday 13: Worked on guide from 6-8am, then 16.45-2.30.am

By this time I have artwork about 60 pages or so. The 40 in the guide plus half that I did twice.

Tuesday 14: Had lessons at college for most of the day, checked proofs as I went along. Uploaded the files around 4.00pm, which I did as a demonstration to a few students.

Went like this:

Days of handing over hard copy in one form or another are long gone. Now it's all print-ready pdf, which as a designer you better make sure that you understand. (Incidentally, I do a course on this - shameless plug). Even so there's a few things that ca trip you up or particular issues that one system has that you don't expect.

In this case after half an hour trying to upload a file that I thought was perfectly good, only to have it get dropped without a meaningful error message (see next screen) I finally remembered that this system doesn't like anything other than simple ASCII filemanes, no spaces no "unusual" characters in the filename. Renamed the file using underscores thus"fringe_guide" as opposed to "fringe guide" and the Kodak system was perfectly happy. You would have thought that they might have warned you or given a sensible error message.

Once you pages are uploaded the system's preflight kicks into action. This goes through each page and the system makes a technical evaluation of each page. I expected this to fail and had made a note of it when I submitted the file - we had one or two pages where there was a low-resolution file. Dutifully they were failed. The rest of the pages I have to click on approve, download a proof or set up for replacement.

In this case rather than go all through the process of calling up the printer and going through I opted to cheat. I opened up each of the problem files in Photoshop and simply doubled the pixel count. This doesn't do anything (You can't upscale picture to get more detail - usually if anything it looks worse) other than make the preflighting software happy.

Out of interest I did a tiny test. I upscaled using two different algorithms to see if there was any difference in the final quality. My hunch is that they will look the same.

There was one last call from the Printers before it went on Press, they had noticed a small issue with the front page. Whilst no-one would of noticed I suspect, out of professional pride I fixed it and the job then went to the press.

We wait with interest.