Digital Original: A Look at Recent Trends in Prepress

For the past decade, Adobe has captured market share for graphic designers and printing companies with its Creative Suite over its biggest rival QuarkXPress. Quark is making a push to get back customers with QuarkXPress 2017 and a new IDML Import feature that can convert InDesign files directly into editable QuarkXPress objects that retain attributes is drawing some interest. But the biggest buzz isn’t about QuarkXPress features, but page layout pricing models.

Small printing companies continue to complain about the Adobe subscription model for its software products. To save money smaller companies would forgo buying or upgrading the latest version of the Adobe software until they had to. Now printers have a monthly bill from Adobe hitting their credit card.

Many software companies are going to a subscription service for software and there are pros and cons. Subscribers has access to the latest updates and fixes, but often they are provided features they don’t need or are forced to update hardware because of compatibility issues. Adobe started the subscription service in 2013 and there are still printers using Adobe’s Creative Suite 6. Adobe stopped selling the box version of CS6 in January 2017.

Quark’s pricing for their box version of QuarkXPress is attractive to small printers. The price for the program is $849 and $149 for a year of support and upgrades. The price drops to $399 if you are doing a competitive upgrade and moving from InDesign, Microsoft Publisher, Photoshop, CorelDraw, or one of the other layout programs. This compares to Adobe’s monthly subscription of $19.99 a month for InDesign or $49.95 a month for the complete suite of software (Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.). 

Which Deal is Best?

Which deal is the best for the individual printer will depend on several factors. Which software can the printer afford? What software is needed to support customers? Are the other software programs in the Creative Cloud needed? Which program is the staff familiar with and are trained people available to use the software selected? Bottom line, select the software that gives you the biggest bang for the bucks, not just because it is the cheapest.

Making Prepress Work For You

Before you make any change to any software, make sure you are making money with what you use now. First, review your selling prices for prepress and design tasks. Some printers are still charging the same prices they did a decade ago and are afraid to raise prices because “customers might complain.”

Second, make sure invoices get processed. Some printers boast of high design prices, yet the customer never gets charged for the work. Make sure your chart of accounts separates the selling prices for the prepress department.

Establish someone in charge of getting changes and additional prepress charges onto the customer’s invoice. If a customer makes a lot of changes in the original order, you can charge for the time you spent making the changes. If the customer didn’t provide a print-ready file, then you can charge a price for making sure the file prints. Measure your prepress productivity monthly. Have a sales goal for the department. Are monthly sales more than the monthly expenses? Are the sales people and CSRs charging the right amounts and covering all the costs?

The prepress department can either be a big money maker or a big money loser. It is up to management to focus on the department’s costs. Don’t let the prepress department be a loss leader to get more digital and press work. Prepress and design play an important role in the production process and customers should be expected to pay for it.