Final Thoughts

Quality Control Throughout Your Workflows

Finally, after assessing all your workflows, take a closer look within the workflows at hand-offs and quality control (QC) check points. Anytime a project stops to be examined or moves from one phase or person to the next, opportunities exist, for better or worse, that affect the efficiency of the workflow.

Communications

One common problem area is communications, either with staff or providers (see Chapter 2 for checklists). AVO is a common acronym, and it stands for avoid verbal orders. Communication delivered only verbally is at risk for interpretation, and after time it might be remembered differently or, worse, be forgotten. Written communication is best both for communicating instructions and annotating progress. Job history is very important; recording the events as they unfold and detailing unique hurdles or problems solved related to the project will only help future efforts become more efficient and avoid costly mistakes.

If this information is shared via a common vehicle such as job management, everyone has access to the same information. Reviewing the project after it's delivered will give all the participants the same information about the project, not just their own individual experience. Communicating clearly with external partners and vendors is extremely important, and redundancy (meaning verbal communication and following up with the same written instructions) in communication is also helpful. Remember that you can never give your vendor too much information.

Image Suppliers

Suppliers, such as photographers, have to be given clearly defined expectations regarding the job as well as any additional services you might want from them. For example, do you want your photographer to color correct the images she shoots for you? Or perhaps you would prefer your print vendor to handle all color correction and therefore do not want to pay for that service from your photographer. Maybe there is not enough money in the budget to hire a photographer, so you will opt for a stock photography service. Don't overlook Adobe's new service, which can be accessed via Bridge from any CS2 product. Digital photography is finding its way into many marketing, communication, and graphic arts departments as more are opting for this economical, easily accessed, and fast turnaround option for shots that don't necessarily require high quality. Make sure someone on staff understands how to operate the camera and how to download images either directly from the camera or via a memory stick. After they're downloaded, images should be properly named, tagged, and catalogued.

If analog images are being shot, scanning and color correction will likely take place. From an efficient workflow perspective, having your print service provider offer scanning services is a common choice to make because they can scan your images and optimize them in anticipation of their own printing presses. These are profiles, and when you open these images in Photoshopfor instance, to add a clipping pathor you place these images in InDesign, you might get a warning about an attached profile. This attached information describes the gamut adjustment between the scanner and the awaiting printing press. These profiles should be preserved and not eliminated during your portion of the workflow.

When hiring a graphic artist, clearly communicate the various distribution methods so the artist can supply you with the appropriate art in the appropriate resolution and color space. I've been in the middle of many a transaction that didn't supply usable art for a project.

Video and animation might be part of the requirement for some aspect of a marketing campaign. After these elements are developed, you might need to transfer them to tape or to the Web. The size of the frame and speed of transmission will affect the project and could represent a bottleneck.

Content Sources

If copywriters do not have a vehicle or application that can integrate into your workflow, they will likely use an application such as Word to accomplish their job function. Communicate clearly how you want those files to be submitted. In many cases that can mean no formatting, simple carriage returns, and a spellcheck are all that's required. On the other hand, in a publishing environment, you might want to develop a hand-off where your Word documents use style tags with the same names as InDesign paragraph style sheets so that when the text arrives and is placed in the layout in the designated frames, the format definitions match up and the text flows into the layout correctly formatted.

Financial information is a common resource you have to work with. Whether it's pricing from sales, specifications from engineering, or the company balance sheet, you will have to become accustomed to how this data behaves as well as develop standards by which it's formatted, reviewed, and approved. How it's expressed and whether it needs to be translated into other currencies or measurements can have an impact on workflow. How much time is spent on struggling with these issues should motivate you to remove any time drainers from these exercises.

When searching the Web for content, keep your expectations low. Finding logos on the Internet might not always yield quality results because web graphics are typically low resolution and use a limited color space, such as indexed color (a palette of 256 colors only). In addition, there's the question of your legal rights to use those logos. Use the content at your own risk. Check to determine when the website was last updated. You can't always tell how accurate someone else's information is.

Clipping services are a common feature in marketing workflows. Staying on top of industry information and competitors' products or services is crucial to a marketing department's strategies. Clipping services monitor specific industries in publications found all over the world. They bring that information into a common repository that is searchable and can be used for research as well as strategy. All these external resources need to be communicated with regularly and accurately. But don't forget that you can build internal resources that will assist you as well.

The following are some supplies that will help your workflow and are great resources for choosing stock, ink, finishing options, fonts, and good reference material:

• I've already mentioned a great resource from AIGA, but many paper companies will gladly give you sample catalogues or fans. And don't forget stocks designed for digital as well as offset.

• Ink companies such as PANTONE and Toyo make fans of swatches for you to choose color from, which is always the best method for choosing or mixing color. A process simulator is also imperative. You should also look for swatches of digital color production. I saw a fabulous exercise by a Parsons Graduate student who created a swatch book of all the different blacks a digital output device (a Xerox iGen3) could image.

• Finishing options and samples might also prove useful. For example, when a metallic finish is desired, is it best to go with a metallic ink or a foil stamp? The answer will depend on the stock you choose and the area receiving the metallic effect.

• Develop a nice font catalogue or, better yet, use Suitcase's nifty font preview feature and have Suitcase print a font catalogue of your fonts for you. If you're budgeting, consider acquiring Adobe's OpenType Font Library, which has more than 2,200 typefaces on CD-ROM!

• Reference options, other than this book, would include Visual QuickStart Guides for your major applications; The PC Is Not a Typewriter, by Robin Williams, Peachpit Press, ISBN 0938151495; and the Chicago Manual of Style. Refer to Appendix B, "Resources," for more information on procuring these references.