Confessions of a Newspaper Graphic Designer

The world of graphic design in the newspaper industry is much like the idea of surgery in the movie (and subsequent television series) M.A.S.H.; your job is to get it done quickly and effectively. Finesse and perfection is a luxury that typically can't be afforded.

I've been working in the newspaper industry for 2 years now carrying "graphic designer" in my collection of titles. Most people in the newspaper industry (especially at smaller and medium sized papers) learn that you will do much, much more than what your business card says. I myself do the dummy (advertising layout), cover art, advertising design, web design and development, random technical stuff, and a little photography on occasion. You could certainly say I stay busy, and our client base works fairly hard to keep me on my toes, too.

With locally focused newspapers (I will not use the inane buzzword "hyperlocal" other than to describe it as such), your typical advertiser will be the smaller businesses looking to promote a sale, service, or general product line. Most newspapers will generate their big money on car dealers and real estate agencies. Beyond that, it is a mishmash of businesses looking to get some public attention for as little money as possible. That brings me to my first problem with local advertising..

Numerous advertisers will try to squeeze as much information as they can into as small an ad as they can get. My job, in this case, is to make the key points as prominent as possible. In reality, only those key points should be in the ad, along with their branding and (possibly) some art conducive to the image or idea being presented. The phrase "5 pounds of shit in a 1 pound bag" comes to mind here. I will try, in this case, to leverage typographical skills and hope that the sales rep can take that cunning (or conniving) attitude and use it to convince the client that less is more.

Another common problem can be seen amongst the high-dollar advertisers.. the ones who spend money on color ads. Many of them feel that if they are paying for full process color that they need to use as much color as possible - thus leading to an ad not entirely unlike a poorly conceived circus. My job, in this case, is to at least present a circus of colors that will print well on a CMYK press - I avoid using colors that use all four plates, or I'll end up a real enemy of the press crew.

One more issue that usually only presents itself every few months is excessive branding requirements. Working at a newspaper, you can't honestly be expected to churn out the same quality of work as a design firm, just because you don't have the time a design firm has. That doesn't stop some companies, however, from trying to save a buck having me design the ad. What does that mean? It means a large stack of papers on branding usage, requirements, color specs, and more. Advertisers like this tend to put a real damper on any sort of enjoyment I might get from the job, because I can't always match the requirements in any sort of efficient manner. I often find myself eyeballing everything rather than measuring for conducive branding placement, just because of time constraints. When an advertiser comes along with over elaborate branding requirements, however, my workflow suffers. I spend hours upon hours on one ad alone, and it just isn't worth it, considering most of these advertisers will only spend money with us in certain special sections that come once a year.

I've touched on it lightly, but I really feel this deserves its own separate fit of vitriolic commentary. I'm referring to working with the press.

Shooting ink onto toilet paper (I never get tired of that metaphor) isn't easy, but I'm going to focus primarily on the design side of things (obviously). First, I'll give you a quick rundown on how the paper goes from InDesign to the printed product.

First, you print the page(s) to a printer known as a "RIP" or "Raster Image Processor" and image setter. This draws the contents onto large sheets of film (unless you've got a direct-to-plate printing system, which is becoming more common). Each plate gets its own sheet of film (one for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black - plus spot plates if applicable), which gets developed through the film processor, and then gets burned into large metal plates which are loaded into the press. At our paper, we still have our backup - a large camera and lighting setup used back in the days of paste-up (yes, they really did paste together the pages) to get the paper onto film for burning.

Now that you've got a basic rundown of the press, here is the problematic part - there are numerous points in the entire process that can cause misalignment of plates, color inaccuracies, and more. Film stretch, alignment problems, paper stretch (when paper gets wet with ink, it stretches), and ink density are all common problems and are tough to deal with, and I have no control over them as an artist. What I do have control over, however, is what goes to the press, and sometimes I've had to get creative.



The above ad was designed to print very, very well - notice anything special about it? Well, the photo has no magenta in the CMYK version. That's one less plate to worry about in the alignment scheme, which makes the press crew's job easier. I just mapped the red plate to black and adjusted the saturation to accommodate the press a little better, and the ad came out beautifully in our press configuration. We print our yellow plate first, since the paper stretches once it gets wet with ink and yellow won't show as bad when it is misaligned.

The final issue is always the most pressing (hah, get that? Pressing. I made a funny) in my industry - deadlines. As the newspaper industry struggles to meet financial goals (or even just make budget), I've found that the higher ups are a little more willing to take ads past deadline, which is usually between 24 and 48 hours before the press starts up. That sounds like a lot of time, but remember that I'm handling a large volume of ads - and that is only the deadline to get the ad space reserved. I've waited until 15 minutes before the paper is supposed to be on film to get ad copy (the information used to build the ad).

Another deadline related problem is dealing with the advertiser. Once I've designed an ad, they usually want to see it to approve it or make changes - so, I send it out to them via whatever means necessary. E-mail is finally getting accepted as a standard, but some still use a fax machine to proof ads. Also available is, in my mind, the most effective method - the sales rep bringing a printed copy of the ad down to the advertiser. Why do I describe it as the most effective? I've hours on end for an advertiser to check their e-mail or fax - if they even bother to. Then, many times, they won't even bother to let you know the ad is ok. I can't tell you the number of times I've had an ad done for days and not heard word on the ad until after it already printed ("just go ahead and run it" is a phrase I'm used to hearing). Thankfully, they are usually just letting you know the ad is ok. Sometimes, however, I have to deal with the backlash of a dissatisfied customer - which means bending over backwords to accommodate them.

That's just a short summary of the joys of working in the newspaper industry as a graphic artist. It is rough, stressful, time consuming, and harrowing, but the excitement of thousands upon thousands of people looking at my work can also be a great boon. Beyond that, I try to cling to the ideal that I'm helping get information out there - even if it is in the form of advertising (which is what supports the actual content).

Expect more commentary on the printed newspaper world in the future.

From the History of WFL: The Stigma of Digital Art

Many people have an intense disdain for digital art. Those whom I have talked to think digital artists let the computer do the work for them - just type a few keys, punch a few numbers, click randomly, and BOOM! Fake Warhol.

If it were only that easy. Sure, people can take a photograph, open it in Photoshop (or The GIMP), run a few filters, and it looks like a piece of crap (relatively speaking). It looks like what people perceive as digital art, in many cases.

Some older art fans even think that fractals printed on a dot matrix printer is what digital art is today - which is asinine.

The computer is a tool, and we can paint using one in a similar fashion to "real" painters. We have our graphics tablets. We have our brushes, which we can design. We can even emulate real painting using software such as ArtRage (they have a free version if you'd like to try it).

We can reach details not even open to consideration from regular painters without huge amounts of time. We don't have overhead of paints and canvas. We have a greater array of colors available to us. We can even attain superior photo realism, should we desire it.

Digital art is a beautiful, open medium. Don't criticize what you don't understand.

-WFL