As hard as we work to produce flawless magazines for our clients, sometimes unforeseen imperfections arise that are out of our control—especially if a problem happens once the magazine reaches the printer. Take the issue of New York magazine we received this week, for example. If you look closely at the cover, you’ll see a color strip at the top of the page, a white strip of binding on the left side and letters running perilously close to the bottom edge. What happened? Barbara Mathieson, Hammock’s production director, explains.
Q. How does a magazine get printed incorrectly?
What happened with New York has to be a problem with the bindery. But even though this particular issue didn’t bind correctly, I would bet that almost every other issue is okay. Sometimes one copy gets hung up on the bindery, and the magazines behind it bind askew. That’s why you’re seeing the color bar on top and the white from the spine on the left side. Plus, the trim is too close at the bottom. When it was on the bindery, it was off kilter. Even though quality control people watch over the process to make sure things bind properly, sometimes a few bad issues sneak through.
Q. What’s the worst printing problem you’ve experienced?
When I worked for a different company, we put out a 500-page catalogue every year. One year, one of the books was askew and it was trimmed down on the right side—of course that one went to the CEO of the company. Every other catalogue I saw was perfect, but that one went to the owner of the company. It was really bad.
On preventing printing problems:
Unfortunately, printing glitches are going to happen sometimes, but we do everything we can to prevent them. There are people watching the machine, but it moves so fast that they miss things sometimes. I stress to our printers that since we’re a custom publishing company, our readers keep magazines like American Spirit or MyBusiness for a long time. I read my magazines and then throw them in the recycling bin, but members of these organizations want to preserve their magazines. So our printer knows how important it is that nothing like this happens. But of course, if a member would ever call because their magazine didn’t look right, we would send a new copy at our expense and notify the printer of the problem.
We can’t guarantee that every issue of every magazine we put out will be perfect—but we can guarantee that we’ll do our best to put out beautiful products every time.