| I fast approach the point where I have been designing for ink and paper for nearly half my life. I am just barely old enough to have started with X-actos and Zip-A-Tone -- in that sense I am the last of the folks who remember doing stuff like that. Personally, I hated it. I thought it was silly to cut up strips of paper and apply hot wax. I embraced the digital tools as soon as they became available at the desktop level in the mid 80s. Everyone expected the boxes to save time, when in fact the new tools allow so much flexibility that you could spend your lifetime -- and mine -- cycling through possibilities. This the part I like best, however, and I use all the available tricks of the trade -- posting of online proofs for disparate clientele, sophisticated digital tools and established color and pre-press theory -- to ensure that the design you fell in love with looks good when it prints. Because nobody wants to pay one of them big ol' printing bills if the job looks terrible. Design. Digital photographic manipulation and compositing. Two, three or six colors. Cross platform compatibility in most cases. And at the end I can give you a disk or CD with graphics that you can place into any word-processing program or presentation package. So you don't have to look at your great printed materials and wonder why you can't use those nice logos on your FAX prints.
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