A reader recently forwarded me an image of a document they were trying to estimate for prepress costs. Basically, it was a 2020 yearly calendar with the 12 months on one page. The issue was how long it should take to create it. The prepress staff estimated five or more hours to create the calendar. The owner thought the time estimate was too high.

I agreed with the owner. I knew there were inexpensive, predesigned 2020 calendar templates available online. But even with that, a prepress person with basic InDesign skills should be able to quickly create the calendar from scratch.

The owner said the prepress person was a good, reliable worker and had an eye for design, but he did take a long time to create the job and even longer to make edits and customer corrections. He knew there were some holes in the prepress worker’s knowledge, but the company was too busy to provide time for training. The prepress person just used what knowledge he had to get something out so it could be delivered on time. Luckily, the owner felt the prepress person was trainable and could learn the tasks, if he had the time to learn. He began steps to improve his prepress person’s performance.