Final Thoughts

Planning for production is well worth the time and attention you will spend on it. Creating and manufacturing content involves many tasks, and you will partner with several sources to produce your jobs. Professionals prepare. You often might be given little lead time, be tasked with coming up with resources, and be given extraordinary deadline goals. This makes it difficult to plan. However, if you don't take the time to plan, you will experience delays on the back end due to mistakes made on the front end. If you can find the time to correct errors, you should be able to find the time to plan. Having to correct mistakes at the last minute creates great stress for everyone in the creative and manufacturing workflow, which is impractical and unnecessary.

I once knew a prepress manager who, at the ripe old age of 35, was experiencing his third heart-related episode. By all appearances physically fit, the doctors put him on a treadmill, tested his heart, and found great stress. Perplexed, they finally sat him down in front of a computer with a database of the most stressful jobs on the planet. The number one most stressful manufacturing job? Printing. They were even able to rank the most stressful printing companiesand he had worked for 3 of the top 10. He is no longer in printing.

Do yourself, your stress level, and even your heart a favorplan.

Note

The previously mentioned checklists are also available at the publisher's website in Chapter 2's Zip file. There you will find InDesign files you can customize to fit your own needs and then export as PDFs.