I have built my entire career in graphics around being able to go from a germ of an idea to printed piece on schedule and on budget. I have produced magazines for two major publishing companies, brochures, books, fliers, FSIs, packaging, web sites and art and illustration for an ad agency and free-lance clients.

When I was hired to work for McGraw-Hill on A/C FLYER magazine, I had to temporarily move to Miami, FL so that I and another staff person could learn how A/C FLYER was produced. We then had to pack up all the equipment and furniture for the magazine and move it to Rye Brook, NY, our home office. I had to set up the computers and network rapidly so we would not miss our press schedule for the next issue. During the nine years I worked at McGraw-Hill, A/C FLYER never missed a press deadline.

In 1999 we switched from our standard desktop publishing setup to Computer-to-Plate (CTP). Making the change increased the quality of the final printed product because two generations of plate processing were eliminated. The printing dots were sharper, and we had more control over how the colors reproduced.

Shortly after we moved to Rye Brook, we increased the paperweight of the magazine. Our competitors were printing on heavy stock (probably 60-100 pound), and we had been printing on a very light 33 pound stock. We also switched from gang scanning our photos because we found that for only a slightly higher cost we could scan all our photos individually. These two steps dramatically increased the printed quality of the magazine, and allowed us to retain our advertising base despite the fact our competitors only charged one fourth of our page rates.

Eventually we went to scanning all the photos for the magazine in-house instead of using our pre-press house, and we were able to save between $2000-2400 a month on separation, storage and retrieval costs.

Our excellent customer service, and quality production staff also helped us retain advertisers.

When I worked on the Show Daily magazines, we were tasked with producing three 40- to 80-page issues in three days. We often used rental equipment in addition to equipment we had shipped ahead of time. We would work in cities throughout the world where the equipment would not always be up-to-date. We often worked late into the night and could not afford to have prolonged equipment outages. While I was art directing the issues, I was able to maintain the equipment and software and keep it running so as to always have the issue ready to distribute early the next day before convention attendees arrived.

© 2004 Mike Perry