Recently I attended the IDEAlliance Proofing Summit held in conjunction with the Publishing Business Conference and Expo at the Marriott Marquis in New York City. During the one day summit I managed to take three pages of notes focused on the meeting’s key topic of Virtual Proofing to the Numbers.
During the initial industry panel a question was raised about how to deal with virtual proofing systems from multiple vendors. Large publishers obviously deal with many printing companies and those companies make use of many of the different virtual proofing systems now available on the market. While it did not seem appropriate to make a comment during the meeting, I will remind my readers that ProofPass.com allows verification of ANY virtual proofing system with centralization of the results on a ProofPass.com internet server.
Bill Pope (of FTA) then spoke about the 2008 Virtual Proofing Systems Certification Program. Bill made a great point that sound color management is the key to successful virtual proofing. While ISO specs inks that most printers are now using, good color management is required to simulate those colorants on a monitor. Bill also made a great point about dealing with proofing disappointment up front. While I loved the comment, I think we all know that customers want what they expect x not necessarily what they see….
A fairly technical overview of the certification program was then provided. I found two items of particular interest during this portion; 1. A shift is being made to utilization of Delta E2000 for virtual proofing verification (already supported in ProofPass.com); 2. One of Bill’s key steps to verify that nothing has been “fudged” by the vendor is almost identical to the ProofPass.com verification procedure.
Some other comments I picked up throughout the day:
- Pressroom monitors will need to be replaced approximately every 18 months.
- Office/prepress monitors should last about three years
- About 90% of the Pantone spot colors can be achieved with a high degree of accuracy on monitors costing about $5,000.
- Grey balance uniformity corner to corner on a monitor is key
- Color clipping on monitors might be overstated – it is localized to fully saturated colors and just results in a slightly duller rendition of the color.
All in all, it was a day well spent with the publishing and agency side of our business.
I read this morning that QuebecorWorld is seeking approval from the courts to pay 4.6 million dollars in bonuses to managers. The bonuses range from $700 to $132,000 and apparently were ‘earned’ last year prior to the filing. Well, I have news for QuebecorWorld and the courts….all the money owed to vendors was also ‘earned’ prior to the bankruptcy filing.
Seems vendors who continue to stand by you should be paid first. As for those of you who may not get bonuses, you are individuals with families and I feel for you I really do. The ownership of some of the small companies stuck in the bankruptcy also have families and we probably will never get paid in full for work we did in good faith.
Sorry for the rant…back to regularly scheduled postings later today 
Recently I was asked by my good friend Howard (Howie) Nelson, Ed.D. to speak at the 25th annual Gravure Industry day held at the ASU Polytechnic campus in Mesa, AZ. Howie asked me to speak to the students about being an entrepreneur. What follows is a section of that talk which describes (very briefly I might add) the 12 year history of ColorMetrix. I realized some of my readers may not know the history my business partner Michael Litscher and I have been through to get where we are today.
ColorMetrix began 12 years ago as a piece of software written only for the 32-bit Windows operating system (that was Windows95 back then for those of you wondering) in a time when Windows 3.1 was in much greater use. As it turns out, this decision that almost everyone but my business partner Michael Litscher and I thought was not so smart has turned out to be quite the opposite. During 2007, the product initially developed over 12 years ago still accounted for 50% of our sales. If you are going to be an entrepreneur, it is very important to trust your gut, make your decisions and stick with them.
Then, about six years ago Mike and I spent a few days sequestered at a condo in the Wisconsin Dells in the middle of the Winter. Our goal was to design the next generation of ColorMetrix (now known as ProofPass.com). If we knew then that it would take 5 years for the product to be sufficiently developed to sell in the kind of volume necessary we might have said forget it, had a few cocktails and went skiing all day (perhaps not in that order). But again, we made a decision to develop an internet based client server product at a time that it was not really in vogue. We made that decision and stuck to it.
Was it a bad decision? I’ll simply answer by stating that after a lot of retooling and right sizing over the last couple of year ColorMetrix is stronger than ever. Sales-wise last year was not a bad year, but in the first 2 months of this year we have sold 1/3 of what we sold all of last year.
So, in a nutshell ColorMetrix has gone from being a company that collected density and dot gain information from densitometers and put that data in industry standard Microsoft Access databases to being a provider of internet based client server color verification, color process control, and color asset management systems used by some of the largest companies in the world.
Sorry about the long absence. Business has been good and I have been busy. You may have noticed a slight change in the look and feel of the site today. I finally got around to upgrading my WordPress installation (the software which drives this whole site). Please let me know if you see any problems or have ideas to improve the site.
I have 3-4 posts and Golden Nuggets in various states of production. Yes, some are still just ideas rattling around in my head, while other have been proofread by my wife already. The first of the 3-4 should be posted by later today, and all should be up by this time next week.
The picture above should explain some of my absence. There was one 7 day period last month when I had my snowblower out 13 times to clear the drive. This snow is almost all gone now, so I have several extra hours each week to work on things other than keeping the driveway clear.
