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X-Rite colormunki

Published
by
Jim Raffel
on April 14, 2008
in blogging and color
. 0 Comments

More than just a few of you have been asking for my thoughts and comments about the recently announced X-Rite colormunki.  Because X-Rite has clearly positioned this device for the Photography and Design markets, for now we at ColorMetrix are taking a wait and see position.  Rest assured I have plenty of thought and comments and they will be coming once I get the opportunity to personally test a colormunki out.

Until that time, I did find a good review over at Photographyblog.com.  Jon Canfield posted this review on April 9th, and he seems to be impressed.

I am going to be trying to make more short posts like this as I find content on other web-sites that I think my readers will be interested in.  I will then summarize them in a (hopefully) weekly  e-mail that may or may not contain one of my now famous Golden Nuggets.

Bithday Post

Published
by
Jim Raffel
on April 13, 2008
in blogging
. 1 Comment

While I would like to say today is about me (since it is my birthday), it is really about my mother.  44 years ago today I remember nothing, but for her I am sure it was a very special day.  I mean what more could a woman have wanted in 1964 than a 5th child? Her 4th son I might add (and quite probably her favorite child - I sure hope you are all getting the sarcasm here).  Thanks Mom!

Anyway, it is my day so the post is just for fun.

First, I share the day with Thomas Jefferson.  While he like all human beings was far from perfect he is one of the people I strive to be more like each day of my life.  I have been fortunate enough to visit his home Monticello on several occasions.  Most recently we visited during the very hot summer of 2005:

monticello-2.jpg

Second, do me a favor for my Birthday and go vote for my friend Shellie Hall as she tries to win a chance to host a daily internet news show.  Her quest is called Mahalo Idol, and if she wins you could say “I helped her get that job!”  Mahalo.com looks like a potentially cool web-site concept, but I will let you all make your own decision on that matter.

All I really want for my birthday is a Brewers win this afternoon against the Mets.  It is 2-1 Brewers in the top of the 2nd as I type this.  I would also like the Brewers to win the division title this year and not drop it to the cubs in the last month of the season.

The Blurb.com Books Arrived

Published
by
Jim Raffel
on April 11, 2008
in blogging, new media and web-to-print
. 0 Comments

Late yesterday afternoon UPS showed up with our box of 20 books from blurb.com.  Put simply we are impressed.  First, the packaging was professional with each book individually shrink wrapped and then all 20 books neatly stacked in an appropriately sized box with packing material to fill the extra space at the top.  Second, my visual assessment of the print quality (I knew I should have worked a color bar into the design somewhere!) is quite favorable.  They even made the scans of old pictures look pretty darn good.  Third, it’s cool having a coffee table quality book that we produced sitting on our coffee table :-).

I made a comment in my previous post about the BookSmart templates being somewhat limiting.  Earlier this morning I read with great interest a post about the success of a promotional postcard web-to-print company by Adam Dewitz over at PrintCEOBlog.com.  Following is a huge quote from that post (Adam I hope I didn’t quote too much):

… In the monograph I present the concept of deterministic print production workflows. These “workflows rely on catalogs of predefined attributes and rules or logic to dictate the design and production of a print product. The limits placed on the design parameters such as paper stock, color versus monochrome printing, bind-ing and finishing methods, and product dimensions allow for highly automated print production systems to be engineered. These turnkey print production systems are highly efficient and require little human intervention. In fact, they might be the ‘Holy Grail’ of computer-integrated manufacturing the print industry is attempting to achieve.”

It appears that this is precisely what PostcardBuilder has done. …

Two comments to finish this post; 1. It appears that is precisely what blurb.com has done as well; 2. It is time to download Adam’s monograph about web-enabled print architectures.

X-Rite Layoffs?

Published
by
Jim Raffel
on April 10, 2008
in blogging
. 1 Comment

Rumor has it that between 100-120 people have been trimmed from the X-Rite workforce since late last week. I want to stress that JimRaffel.com is not a news site, and as of now I have only obtained this information from one source….developing…In addition to the comment you can read on your own I received confirmation that 108 people (lot’s of good people my source added) have been let go….

New Media meets Old Media (Blurb.com)

Published
by
Jim Raffel
on April 10, 2008
in blogging and new media
. 2 Comments

If you have been reading the Golden Nuggets or JimRaffel.com for any length of time you know I have covered the “New Media” topic a few times.  While considering self-publishing a book of Golden Nuggets to use for marketing activities, I came across blurb.com.  Now, if you expect the rest of the post to be about my new Golden Nuggets book being published…Stay tuned-I plan to have that done by GraphExpo (where the ColorMetrix booth will have some kind of drawing each day to give away copies of the Golden Nuggets book).

This post is about the preparation of a 40-page book of photos and memories that my wife and I, along with other extended family, put together for my Father’s 84th birthday later this month.  Blurb.com makes it quite easy to self-publish a book of this type.  Being an RIT graduate with book production, layout and design, typography classes, etc. makes the process even easier.

The most difficult part of any publishing endeavor (including creating a basic web-site) is the collection of relevant content.  Beginning in late December and early January we emailed my large immediate family (I am the youngest of 5 children) and other extended family requesting a digital photograph and a caption to go along with that photograph.  We included a few deadlines in order to make sure we would have time to review all the material, organize it, and have it proofread by my wife and mother (yes, at least one of them proofed this post before it was published – I have learned that lesson).

I am pretty sure a whole lot of you are already laughing and thinking to yourself…I wonder how many deadlines got missed and how many people called or emailed to ask if they could send an old picture and can you scan it for me?  Well, every deadline got missed and almost half the book is composed of scanned photos (we ended up scanning about half of those).  Had I not spent 20+ years in this crazy printing industry those things would have upset us, but we really did go into the project expecting that.

In order to produce a book with blurb.com, you must use the BookSmart software which can be downloaded for free from the blurb web-site.  BookSmart is available in either PC or MAC flavors.  Since my primary computer is still a PC I opted for that version.  We found the software easy to use and although it crashed a few times throughout the process we never seemed to lose any content because of the nifty built in auto-save features.  While we sometimes found the mandatory BookSmart page layouts limiting, by and large we were able to do just about everything we wanted to do.

We submitted the book for printing on March 24th, and just found out our 20 copies will arrive on or about April 10th.  So, keep your eyes posted here and we will let you know how the book turned out.

#69 IDEAlliance Proofing Summit in Review

Published
by
Jim Raffel
on March 18, 2008
in GRACoL, ISO, blogging, calibration, color, conferences, delta E and guidelines
. 0 Comments

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.

QuebecorWorld Asks Court to Pay Bonuses?!?!?!

Published
by
Jim Raffel
on March 18, 2008
in blogging
. 0 Comments

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 :-)

ASU Gravure Days Talk Excerpt

Published
by
Jim Raffel
on March 17, 2008
in blogging, gravure and history
. 0 Comments

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.

I’m back to posting…

Published
by
Jim Raffel
on March 14, 2008
in blogging
. 0 Comments

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.

photo_021608_002.jpg

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.

#68: Sustainable Green Printing

Published
by
Jim Raffel
on February 7, 2008
in measurement and process capability
. 0 Comments

What is this new and latest buzzword sustainability? If I have offended you by calling it a buzzword I am not apologizing. Please do not misunderstand me; I think sustainability is a good thing. Smart printing businesses have been engaging in most if not all of the components of sustainability for years. The reason is quite simple - PROFIT.

Recycling is a key component to a sustainability program. Has anyone reading this been around long enough to remember the late Roger Dickeson’s War on Waste (WoW) waged by web printers back in the 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s? Did they do this to be “green” or “sustainable?” Personally I think not - they did it to MAKE MORE MONEY!

Did the web printer I worked for in the 80’s and 90’s commit more resources to better segregation of waste paper streams, including office paper, to be green or sustainable? Did we find ways to recycle even the cores from our rolls of web paper to be more sustainable? No, we did these things to reduce the cost of waste disposal and increase the revenue received for recyclable product. The net result of course was that we became more sustainable and green.

I suspect the sustainability ‘consultants’ out there are screaming right now that he does not get it! While you may be right, I do understand that there are other components to a complete sustainability program including a social responsibility component. I am sure even the social responsibility component of sustainability, when properly executed, can and will result in more of that dirty word - PROFIT.

What caught my interest about sustainability is that improvement must be measurable. Then I got to thinking - if the sustainability movement repackaged WoW, what else have they repackaged and re-labeled? Deming’s Statistical Process Control (SPC) that’s what. The past twelve years of selling and servicing ColorMetrix color verification and process control software has provided me with a good knowledgebase in this area. I have also written quite a bit about the topic on this blog.

Since you can read all the past posts, I will keep my explanation of using process control in a sustainability campaign short and sweet. Following is a simplified ink jet proofing example:

  1. Establish a baseline of ‘bad’ proofs as a percentage of the total produced.
  2. Utilize color verification and process control tools like ColorMetrix and ProofPass.com to verify color quality of all proofs produced.
  3. Review process control charts and other data to establish when and why variation/drift is occurring.
  4. Fix/Improve the causes which can be fixed and improved, and learn to ignore the special causes.
  5. Return to step one and compare current results with the baseline.

SPC works and Quality is NOT free, it is instead an investment with a return.