press baby

This morning's class on File Basics for Poster and Display Printing turned out to be pretty...basic. It was pretty much a checklist of the 5 most common problems that would cause a printer to bounce your job.

( Ambit Press Best Practices )

This is all pretty obvious to me going into the class. (It's also general to any print job, not just to large-format.) I guess I know more than I think I know. Do I know enough to get a job in this field? I don't know that.

Then the Operations Manager got up to (finally) talk about the various media and mounting choices for large-format printing, and gave us each a swatch of paper, vinyl, banner vinyl, foamcore, sintra board, gator board, and coroplast.

Finally, we got a tour of the plant, from the 54" inkjet to the Docutech laser printers to the offset presses, with examples of typical jobs from each press.

THE REALLY COOL THING, the thing that made my whole day, was that one of the samples for the offset press was the Arisia Souvenir Book. bridgetminerva take note: he made a point of opening to the inside front cover, and showing off the quality of the ads. W00t!

Afterwards, fabulous lunch with ceo, doctordidj, and tcb.

Then back to Andor to see electrictruffle and his darling baby boy. Bonus social time with veek, ceelove and her darling one, and someone I (probably) had not met before.

OTOH, this had me going home at 5pm, and the traffic on 93 sucked enormous rocks. If it's like this every day, maybe I don't want to work in Cambridge.