When you’re in a hurry to get things done, you don’t have time to waste. You’re on a deadline and you need to know how to do something now. No frills. No alternatives. Just solid, efficient steps. That is what Bare Bones Solutions is all about.

Print isn’t dead, yet. Contrary to popular belief, print is alive and well. In fact, for some industries, there is more print than ever because sending someone a printed piece is an excellent way to stand out from other companies going cheap and only promoting their product or service on the Internet.

Even though printing presses are technology dating back to Gutenberg, they are still the most cost-effective way to print long runs. For instance, a web press can print sixty-five thousand impressions an hour. Considering that each impression could be thirty-two pages, that is two million eighty thousand pages per hour. Even though digital presses are getting faster, they can’t keep up with this volume.

Prepress hasn’t changed significantly in over twenty years except in one area, automation. Many companies have bought into the idea of “lights out” prepress which basically means there isn’t a person looking at files. Everything is automated. As a result, most printers now want a PDF. This basically means that the responsibility for everything in a file is on the designer’s shoulders.

The goal of this booklet to identify areas of concern and to ensure that your artwork can be printed without costly delays or reprints.