Some of my co-workers were not even born when I first picked up an exacto knife and started doing pasteup on my Junior High year book in 8th grade. I have a boat load of traditional, old school, graphic design experience which comes in handy, even in this era of computer/internet everything.

Here, at Bailey Gardiner, a San Diego advertising agency, it seems we are focused primarily on everything internet, however, not all of the work we do is about cutting edge social media and advertising on the web. There are creative projects we produce for clients that are more traditional in nature. The technology to produce them has changed, but it still takes time and experience. One of these projects is the Membership Magazine for The San Diego Museum of Art. Here’s the process I used for designing the magazine:

The magazine is 22 pages plus a 4 to 8 page Program Guide insert. The content is written, edited and provided by the Museum. I take the copy and images and design each page. I have a certain amount of graphic content and room to arrange it on each page. This part of the process is like working on a very large jigsaw puzzle and takes about 30 hours to complete. I also make design suggestions for the background colors of each issue. As I am creating the design, I set up the magazine mechanicals to be printer ready. This includes:

• Working within short- and long-term deadlines
• Building mechanicals in InDesign to correct size with bleeds
• Formatting the type to follow the design format
• Eliminating True Type fonts
• Sizing, cropping, color correcting and retouching photographs
• Formatting all content from RGB to CMYK
• Deleting all extraneous colors
• Proofreading. (The magazine mechanicals go back to the Museum for at least 4 rounds of proofreading by over 20 people)
• Making revisions which sometimes includes redesigning pages
• Making print outs and actual dummies of the magazine to check design consistency
• And, finally, after a sign-off from the client, I output the job by doing final proofreading checks, pre-flight checks, gathering files and delivering to the printer

The entire production process takes about 10 weeks from start of writing to the mail house delivering the final pieces to the 12,000 members of The San Diego Museum of Art.

I use a computer instead of an exacto knife these days and it still takes skill and dedication to produce a traditional graphic design print project.