Defining a timeline, and getting it done!

When you need programs for an event that starts on Friday night, it’s imperative that the programs be there Friday night (not Saturday morning) and look good. That’s exactly what needed to happen with the recent Dayton Philharmonic Volunteer Association’s “10 days of design” event. It kicked off on June 18th at a dinner party for 300 people (at the John Schantz house, owned by Kevin and Kathleen Weaver). Tim Hull & his company TDH marketing did the design work on the 8 page program, which printed in full color on an 80# Gloss cover stock. It had a lot of photos of work that had been done to the house by different vendors and contractors, so color and presentation were important.

As with many custom projects like this (starting with TDH’s role), gathering all of the information, creating the content, processing it and proofing it are a big job. And like so many times, a lot of the information was not available untill the last minute. I’ve got to give TDH credit on this one. They called me a month before and talked about the project.  We talked about size, price and quantity as well as timing expectations, so we all knew it would be a very fast turn around when we got the order. And remember that 5,000 8-page full-color programs is a fairly large order. So when crunch time came around and we had two days to get them done and delivered, we all knew what to expect.

Tim called me a couple of days before it was ready to print, just to tell me it’s coming, and when the two days were up, it was delivered on time. Tim was at the DPVA event (which I hear turned out to be a beautiful evening event), and told me that everybody was just amazed at how good the programs looked considering the timeline. Even though this was just another couple of days in the life of our printing operations (and TDH’s creation services), it’s a little glimpse behind the scenes of how good collaboration between everyone makes projects like this look so good and seem so smooth.

Specs:

• Job Title: DPVA (Dayton Philharmonic Volunteer Association)
• Quantity: 5,000
• Number of Pages: 8 page, full color
• Size: 8.5 x 11
• Paper Stock: 80# Gloss Cover

Timeline:

• Wednesday June 16th
  • TDH emails job specs.
  • Mike gives departments managers a heads up and writes up order.
  • Mike & Bob go over the schedule (make some scheduling changes since it is such a rush)* to ensure on time delivery.
  • Bob gets paper ordered.

• Thursday June 17th
  • PDF Art (Yea TDH!) arrives in the morning via Oregon FTP site.
  • Prepress sends PDF art through workflow, which checks it against PDFx verifications.**
  • Prepress sends Verified PDFx proof back to TDH for approval.
  • TDH has slight color adjustment, prepress makes adjustment and generates color managed Epson proof.
  • Proof Approval
  • Plates made at Noon.
  • On press by 12:30pm.

• Friday June 18th
  • 8:00am job in the Bindery department for cutting and Saddle Binding.
  • Shipping delivers job on time.

*Using an integrated scheduling system allows us to look at all of our resources,  make sure we have the room to run the job and not put anything else out of delivery range
**Checking against PDFx is basically a preflighting operation, so that we know we will not have any problems when it’s time to Rip plates