It Should Only Take Five Minutes: Part I of What Designers Do With Their Time

“It shouldn’t take more than five minutes or so. I saw a web designer do it once.”

Words that make any print designer cringe. I remember one client I had a few years ago who wanted seven or  eight images combined to make a design and he told me it would take only a few minutes.

First, I had to find all these images. Just for the heck of it, you try a search on fotosearch.com, istockphoto.com, bigstockphoto.com or photos.com for some similar group of images, let’s say, “flower.”  You can even get more specific and ask for “wild flower” and “isolated” or “object” or “masked” (isolated or object or masked means the flower is the only image, there is no background).

These flowers all have to be similar in style and the proper resolution, so you have to click through each one that has potential and take a closer look. You might have to visit two or three or a dozen stock art sites to find what you’re looking for, assuming it’s available at all and you don’t end up shooting your own images or hiring someone to do it.

Next, you need to make sure you can use the images the way you want  (in this instance, print them on a book cover). Royalty Free doesn’t mean “use for anything” like so many people believe. There are all sorts of print and usage restrictions on Royalty Free images. For instance, many companies let you only print 250,000 – 500,000 copies of the image, so the client needs to be made aware of this and the contract has to reflect it, unless you have the client license the image, which is far easier. Some companies won’t allow images to be used on book covers without buying an extended license and many want the company or photographer credited, so you have to keep track of that information. This is all in the End User License Agreement (EULA) for each photo. Some of these are very long and complicated and filled with legalese. The EULA at Photos.com has 4,819 words, and that’s typical.  I often have to write the company’s lawyers and ask for clarification. It usually only takes a day or so, but sometimes it can take much longer.

Obviously, that few minutes the client estimated this work would take was up several hours ago and we haven’t even started to design the cover.

The next issue that many non-designers don’t understand is that creating something for the web is vastly different than creating something for print. Print files are much larger and the color profiles are different. Using the convenient tools to click and remove backgrounds that so many graphic programs like Photoshop offer, works great for web images, but rarely do they work so well for print images.

The image below on the left has been lifted from the background and placed on a white background. It doesn’t look too bad for the web, but take a look at the close up below that. Those jagged edges would show up on print, so the designer has to blow that image up and clean up around the edges, one pixel at a time. It’s a tedious task and can take hours if the image is complicated or particularly bad.

 

It’s easy to see how a “five minute job” can take hours and even days if you’re formatting for print and doing it legally and professionally.

 

 

Comments

[Oakley Goggles]

I agree with you , it's really hard to format and design an image for print.