You have created the perfect presentation after many hours of work. You have printed out several proofs on your office laser printer and everyone agrees it is perfect. Your piece is complete and you send the art to your printer or promotional products representative. Everything is great, until the printer calls you. Your piece will not work on a printing press. The quality you wanted is not available with the art you have created. Why?

Overall, the answer is in the tools you use. The majority of people are creating their work in many of the typical office or home programs. Which build colors in a system designed RGB (Red, Green, Blue). The RGB system is the same system that your monitor uses to build colors on your screen. They print fine on your printer, however they DO NOT print at all for a printing press. The printing presses use a designated CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) system, also known as a "four color process" or a system of "Spot Colors", (Pantone Matching System) to reproduce colors. Since most programs used, do not support CMYK or Spot Color separations, there is not a way to reproduce your job to print on a press.

Another primary need is for high resolution. High resolution is the number of pixels generated per inch. Typically most programs produce graphics and photos at 72 pixels per inch. Computer screens and screen captures (from the internet) are typically 72 pixels per inch. In order to get a good clean reproduction on a printing press, you need a minimum of 300 pixels per inch of resolution. If you do not have high enough resolution for your graphics and photos, they will look like they have the "Jaggies" or a very square pixel image at the edges.

Fonts are another misunderstood tool. Just because you have a font on a PC does not mean that the graphic design house can reproduce it on an image setter. "True Type" fonts do not work well on image setters. Usually "Type 1 Postscript" fonts are needed. "Postscript" fonts are two parts, a "screen" font so you can see it on your monitor and a "printer" font that the image setter uses to make high resolution images. PC and Mac fonts are not interchangeable, and not all fonts are available on both PC and Mac (nor are they all available in "Postscript" format). Some allowances may need to be made to accommodate for the differences.

So, back to the question of, Why use a Graphic Designer?

Graphic designers are experienced at logo creation as well as using various design elements with logo or marketing pieces. There are a number of things to take into consideration within the entire piece and how all the elements work together insuring you will not have "surprises" when putting your graphics to work in a variety of ways.

That, of course, does not prevent you from giving input and guidelines from other programs that you have available. However, it allows for the inevitable changes that are typically necessary to reproduce it.