Team Impression: Day 2

I spent most of today in Reprographics. I'd never really understood what reprographics meant or involved, at Team it is basically the bit in between the designer, creating and finishing a piece of work and then that file being made ready to go on the litho or digital presses. I'd never really realised how much work is involved turning a design we have done into something a professional printing press can use. In repro they also do all the proofing, so in most jobs they will produce a high res proof to check the colours and a low res proof to check the construction and pagination etc.

I always thought that proofs were for the clients to check that their designs were being reproduced as they wanted, but they are as much for the printers operating the presses. The people in repro will check that the proofs are perfect so when they get sent to the people operating the presses they can see exactly what they have to do.

There is a piece of software that handles the job in the estimating, quote and spec stage. The specs are then carried into another piece of software along with the artwork which produces the proofs and impositions etc. It is all a really structured and organised workflow, its very interesting to see how it works.

As interesting as repro was I get the impression its quite repetitive and could be a bit boring. I hope tomorrow they put me somewhere where I can get close up and see more of the printing and finishing processes.