Makin' it

Last night was rough. We struggled to polish off the hi-res PDFs only to find that our printer wouldn't cooperate. The proofs that we tried to print were cast blue. I left after 1:00 A.M., and Eric and Pryor toiled for an hour after that. But this morning we talked to our tech guy in Canada and got everything straightened out... As of now, the printer is going off.


But let's go back just a few weeks. The manuscripts starts off like a regular Word document that I clean up and cut down to an approximate number to go with however many pages we envision the article to be. After that, I let let it loose to readers who attack the pages like rabid dogs.


Eventually, the articles get laid out. I import the words and images into the templates and then Wendy does anything from fine-tune to overhaul the sucker. It's a little more fun for the copy editors to look at the layouts with pics. When the files are sufficiently tight, we turn them into hi-res PDFs that we upload to our printer's system.


No, we didn't run out of toilet paper. But our proof printer did run out, so we had to open up a new roll of satin-finish Fuji photo paper. This stuff is hard to get, but don't settle for substitutes.


When the files are on our printer's system, we revisit them until they're ready to print as proofs on the giant Epson 4800. The proofs are actually better than the regular magazine pages. We look at those to make sure everything lines up, there are no egregious errors in headlines, the pagination is correct, photos bleed to the frames or off the page, and so on. After that, we approve the files and send the proofs.

Got it? Now go out there an make your own magazine.