Training Day

In any field, training is important. Our store is the local training store for the area where people come from many places in the Chicagoland area. We have had people come from all over the Chicago land area to train in management, basic procedures in what our company does, as well as print. As the print lead, I train on the machines in the store, print procedures, marketing, and other important areas relating to workflow, how to work with clients, and organization systems to put in place. This past training day, I worked with a new graphic design hire from our owner’s other business location.

Workflow

When we get a new design or print project it is important to have a workflow set in place to create an organized and efficient work environment for the team. We start with creating a job ticket (check out communication tools in the Team Strategies post!) which details the job. Once the specifications for the job are complete, we then move on to the next step, which is file organization.

Organization System

Having agreed upon file organization system is necessary for any design team to work efficiently and cleanly. Our system starts with the year and then goes to the specific clients. Within each client folder we have a print ready folder which is our final designs that are ready for production. We also have a working folder that is for all the different assets that we are working on for the job such as photoshop or InDesign files. Our assets for the project are also in the client folder for each specific job. For our clients that we done multiple jobs for, it starts with each specific projects and dates.

Print Production

Our store contains many different types of machines for print production and each of them has their procedures and/or software that requires training on how to use it and preparing files.

Some of our different machines includes:

Wide format Printer

Graphtec (contour cutting)

Laser cutter

Printers

Large format lamination

Learning the different machines also includes understanding necessary file preparation for production. Understanding how the machine operates and prepping files helps with the design process and communicating with clients. Sometimes a client will not always know what they want. Sometimes after investing the project, the initial final product may not work best for what the client’s needs and I can show them how a different design piece can better suit them.