Discussion

By Dov Isaacs on May 17, 2024

… And I hired three of your co-author students right out of RIT for Adobe way back then! ??

By Muhd Yusuf on May 22, 2024

Totally agree with you Frank!

By Joe Treacy on May 22, 2024

I agree that PDF has had a profound global impact. But not only in prep and printing itself, but also in artwork conceptualization and preparation for being processed through a digital / PDF workflow.

Conceptualization, too, because once the vast and seemingly limitless digital and PDF repro possibilities and efficiencies were made clear, it opened the door to whole new levels of creative thinking about what design solutions could achieve.

It had been written in earlier decades that updates in typesetting and printing technologies had shifted a “balance of power” from the printer in earlier centuries, to the creative designer by the mid twentieth century.

By the late 1980s, the creative digital workflow, which often culminates in PDF for printing, brought an explosion of new possibilities to the creation and production of the repro art itself.

That not only gave the creative designer (who may be in one or several of many capacities at different kinds of firms) far more design potential and production efficiencies.

But also again changed the creative - production -printing team dynamic in phenomenally positive ways.

Every day, PDF continues to open up exciting, empowering possibilities, providing a real difference in my own creative life and career.

Congratulations and thank you to Dov and everyone involved for seeing the need, visualizing and then actually delivering today’s far more richly satisfying design, production and printing experience for everyone who relies on it daily.

Joe Treacy
Director of Typography
Treacyfaces.com

By Dov Isaacs on May 22, 2024

One other side effect of PDF workflows was a significant reduction of “wasted printing.” PDF also introduced streamlined workflow and ultimately higher quality printed products.

What is “wasted printing” you may ask?

I consider “wasted printing” to be printing of “proof copies” of documents either as a document is created or revised. PDF and the various viewing applications such as Adobe Reader and Acrobat finally allowed one to get a reasonable high-fidelity on-screen proof of the created content as the content is created and modified, catching “issues” (content, layout, graphics, etc.) without having to actually print every time.

Such PDF-based high fidelity, on-screen proofing saves time and effort and as I have found, ultimately improves the quality of the content when it is actually printed.

- Dov