Project Management/Scheduling

This post is about developing skills in managing projects and meeting deadlines. What you have to do once a deadline is given is to work backwards from that deadline. Take into account all the steps and processes you have to accomplish to meet the deadline and assign yourself a date/time where each stage must be accomplished. This gives you a complete timeline for your project and if you meet each point along the way, you shouldn't have problems. Remember to build into that timeline some slack to allow for potential problems. Production problems, changes in the project and a host of other difficulties tend to crop up towards the back-end of projects. The closer to a deadline you get the more likely problems will happen. Learn to anticipate problems. Don't miss deadlines! 

To relate this to your current deadlines... you need to get your .pdf of your Ride poster submitted to the print monitors by Monday. Tuesday should be your fall-back time to reprint the project if you had problems printing on Monday.

Design early and often

When taking a comp into production you probably experienced the desire to make changes to the layout, because the design is not translating well into the computer and needs something not thought of earlier in the thumbnail or comp stages. But, you are restrained in doing so because the client has already approved the layout you are assembling. If your layout really sucks, you need to work to make it better, it just means you have to submit these better ideas for approval by art directors, creative directors, account executives and the client. Don't be afraid to suggest something to make a design better. That is the ultimate goal... to produce exceptional work. If can sell your supervisors on the alterations, it is their job to get the approvals on the changes. Don't let the process dictate quality. But, to be efficient in the process, you have to design early in the process so alterations aren't needed at the back end.

When introduced to this design process of conceptual development, thumbnails and comps, students have a tendency to delay creative and visual decisions until they can get on the computer. The computer seems to be a security blanket. But the real design takes place in the grey matter between your ears early in the process. The markers and technology only translates what is in your mind onto paper. You need to keep in mind when thumbnailing and comping how you are going to assemble the layout on computer. Experimenting visually and designing variations takes much less time at the thumbnail stage than it does on the computer. Use this stage to your advantage.

My days as a Stripper

Just another note about the changes that computers have brought to graphic designers. Initial entry-level jobs in the graphic arts typically were that of a paste-up artist. That was my first job in the industry. Today, a graphic artist will take an approved marker comp to final art production in InDesign on the computer. Paste-up artists would produce the mechanical art boards that were used by pre-press technicians to produce plate-ready negatives in a photo-mechanical process. 

It is these mechanical art boards with the text pasted onto the base art board and the various layers of acetate overlays, and Ruby and Amberlithe that the pre-press technicians would shoot on those big vertical and horizontal stat cameras. Each layer of the mechanical art would have to be photographed in negative and then stripped together. Remember, I told you that I used to be a stripper. Tell your parents you have an ex-stripper teaching your class - see if that gets their attention. 

The stripping process required taking multiple negatives of text, images and masks and assembling them together. Strippers and camera operators were very, very detailed oriented people that knew a lot about photographic "special" effects. The end goal was to get a composite negative for each color used in the design to make a printing plate. This is what the old guy in the movie Helvetica - who was it?, was talking about as being so difficult in the days prior to computers. The designer and paste-up artist didn't see what the design actually looked like until a blueline, color key and/or Match Print proof was made from the composite negatives. You had to be very good at visualizing a design in your mind and you relied heavily upon the marker comp. That is why comps had to be so accurate in representing the design. It was all you had to go by visually until the proofs arrived.

On Friday I'll bring in a small mechanical paste-up board to show you what a production art mechanical board looked like in the days before computer.

This is so Old School

Yep, thumbnails and marker comps are indeed old school. The computer has replaced much of the drudgery of layout that existed before computers were integrated into the design process. Comping was rather tedious day in and day out. Thumbnailing ideas is still utilized extensively... the process is a fast way of visually getting ideas onto paper. But the full-blown marker comp has been diminished in layout process. 

Comping skills are still in high demand for story boarding commercials and scenes in motion pictures or to conceptualize something that doesn't yet exist. Comping has become a specialized skill set. Not many designers can do it well any more.

To do thumbnails and comps in a design process is a way for me to reinforce in your mind that YOU are the designer, not the computer or any of the technology currently utilized today. Computers will not make a better design just by using them. There is no "Make good design" button on the keyboard or in the drop down menus. You are the creative factor and you can be creative and design with or without computers. A good design hinges upon creative application of the basic design principles and elements. Those principles and elements should also be included on the tatoo list.

Copy Markup

This is an FYI as to how to read type mark-ups. Since designers are now essentially the typesetters, this mark-up language isn't utilized to the extent it used to be when a designer had to communicate to a typesetter. Today, production artists assembling layouts on a computer for a designer or art director may be directed using this markup language.

EXAMPLES

12/14 [18 Times Reg.

This means 12 point type, 14 point leading, Flush left in a column 18 picas wide, set in Times Regular.

13/18 [24] Helv. Bld.

This is 13 point type, 18 point leading, Justified column, 24 picas wide, set in Helvetica Bold.