The need for preflight quality assurance arose at the same time as digital technology became widespread enough to land in the hands of well-meaning customers who suddenly felt qualified to be graphic designers.

In those early days, a printer would have to inspect each digital document, manually verifying the appropriateness of art file formats, the presence of all versions of all needed fonts defaulted or improperly kearned fonts, the proper color coding, and various other factors. If just one critical element were overlooked, it was back to the drawing board.

Have you ever had to reverse your workflow because of a jaggy piece of art, a missing line of type, a defaulted font that looked "fine" on the monitor, a piece of art that just seemed to have colors that went from vibrant to dull? Those are the perils of accepting client work in digital format and attempting to output the job without a preflight procedure. Many of your well-meaning clients, and indeed, even ad agency artists, often do sloppy work from a technical standpoint, ignoring such issues as linescreen, dpi, RGB vs. CMYK and a host of other issues that can prevent you from outputting their piece in the way they believe they've provided it.

The best form of preflight is to create perfect documents in the first place. How exactly do you make a perfect document? These ideal conditions can only occur if your clients are properly educated. Ideally, you would plan the design of the document, taking into account the output resolution and linescreen and scan the images and photos at a DPI 1.5 to 2.0 times the linescreen. You would choose a list of specific fonts, commonly called "Corporate fonts." These are the only allowed fonts the designer should be using. No custom fonts from home, please!

You would also decide well ahead of time which specific colors are being used, whether the job is a 4-color CMYK process job, or if a 5th Pantone plate will need to be printed, and so forth. If a "blueprint" for the document is well established, then the job can be built according to the exact specifications and the preflighting steps can be abandoned altogether – or so it is hoped, in the proverbial "perfect world."

It's easier said than done, especially when you are a quick printer and receive all kinds of poorly created documents from well-meaning amateurs. You see it every day. People walk in with their masterpieces, created with all manner of inexpensive DTP applications, and tell you "it's all ready to go, it shouldn't take any time at all." Keep your aspirin bottle handy!

Since it's impossible to pre-educate all of these customers, the alternative is to institute a standard preflight checking program. It's faster and easier to tell your customer that you have a process in place to check every technical aspect of their job than to try to tell them in advance, why that $60 software they bought will probably not cut it.

When you present a preflight report showing them in exact detail what needs to be fixed before their job can be printed, the need for your expertise becomes more than a matter of your own opinion. You're not insulting their abilities; the preflight software is the culprit that tells them that their job specs are not up to snuff. They can then understand why your services are going to cost them more than the simple "pop it in, print it out" process they like to imagine.