Discussion

By Alan Darling on Nov 20, 2024

Great topic and panel!

First and apology - sorry for some of the alphabet soup in here, but I have tried to define any abbreviations used in this comment.

I go back to DDAP (Digital Distribution of Advertising for Publications) that started in the late 80's/early 90's to standardize the delivery of ads to publications.

It is not JUST as need for standards (and preferably Accredited International Standards), we need a forum to educate, demystify and discuss the users'/designers' needs, terminologies and what needs to be standardized - with participation from users and vendors to feed the standards efforts. There also needs to be a group to define best practices - i.e. using the standards to define terminology, tools (to measure and QA) and workflows.

Truly three legs of the stool.

I am a great believer in the fact that if you don't learn from history you are bound to relive it, so going back to to the DDAP era, it started with the early DDAP conferences that fed USA CGATS (Committee for Graphic Arts Technology Standards) to ISO TC 130 (Technical Committee 130*) to author ISO ACCREDITED INTERNATIONAL standards (ISO 15930 - for the PDF/X family of standards) that was followed by the Ghent PDF Workgroup that developed best practice workflows, tools and terminology for several specific applications. All with direct and enthusiastic participation from users and vendors, and also direct sponsorship from vendors with participation from users in the form of [paid] attendance in conferences and forums.

Simple - right? Just one of the hurdles we experienced was to convince Adobe that PDF/X did not negatively restrict and devalue Adobe's broader PDF capabilities, and it took a group of us going to meet the late John Warnock in San Jose where he agreed and supported the stance taken in PDF/X.

The point here being that there are sometimes barriers that you don't anticipate and you have to be creative to clear those hurdles.

I encourage responses to this post...

Alan

*ISO/TC 130 is the technical committee for international standards within print and publishing, brought together under the title ‘Graphic Technology’. Definition from ISO's website.

By Kevin Abergel on Nov 20, 2024

Thank you, Alan, for such an insightful and well-articulated comment! I completely agree that creating standards is just one piece of the puzzle. As you pointed out, education, collaboration, and defining best practices are equally vital to ensure those standards are adopted and effectively implemented.

Thank you again for sharing your experience and insights—it’s comments like these that truly enrich the conversation!

By Sean Roberts on Nov 20, 2024

Alan, you are spot on. Speaking from the OEM segment, we are certainly cognizant of maintaining our value driver message— so ensuring we don’t devalue or negatively restrict differentiation is a critical factor. That said, I believe we all also agree one byproduct of digital embellishment standards could be wider industry adoption (demystifying the applications builds market trust).

I suggested on the podcast and will reiterate here we should consider what existing standards in the print industry can be leveraged in the short term and applied to digital embellishment. We need not reinvent the wheel, but instead embrace tried and trusted terminology/tests/controls perhaps already deployed.