This week is d-day for my annual freelance project — creating the program for the Miss Houston Pageant. Which means I won’t be doing much of anything outside of working, designing, and sleeping this week.
This year we seem even further behind than usual. There are always girls who send their photos late, and advertisers who send their ads late. Lateness would not be quite as big an issue if what they sent was correct. But the ones who send late tend to be the ones who also don’t follow the specs. There are the ones who send a 2×3 at 72 dpi photo they saved off the internet despite you specifically request a 5×7 at 300 dpi. And there are the ones who send lovely ads with photos that run right to the edge of the page, but their file is sized to 8.5×11, instead of the 8.75×11.25 I need to effectively print a full bleed, and their text is so close to the edge of the page that enlarging it slightly would mean that the text gets cut off. And there are the ones that insist on trying to fix the file themselves, instead of complying with my polite request to have their photographer or designer send the file directly to me.
It’s not their fault, and I’m not blaming them. They’re not designers or photographers, and I don’t expect them to know exactly how to do things. But I do get tired of the endless polite emails saying “this file is not large enough, here are the requirements, please try again.” Perhaps I should make a tutorial. But I doubt anyone would actually read it.
