Graphics
by Daniel Gray
PrePRESS SOLUTIONS designs, builds, and sells PostScript imagesetting systems. Their successful PrePRESS DIRECT! Catalog division prints millions of catalogs a year. In doing so, the company was the first to bring large-scale direct mail catalog marketing to the graphic arts world. Their catalogs feature everything including fonts, software, graphic arts supplies, optimized workstations, imagesetting systems and drum scanners. Consequently, prices in the catalog run the gamut from tens of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.
While the PrePRESS DIRECT! Catalogs are very successful, the goal at PrePRESS Main Street is not to simply bring the catalog to the Web. Instead, the site's purpose is to create a place where graphic arts professionals-from designers to production managers-can come to get the latest news on the industry, regardless of manufacturer. Main Street's realm of newsworthiness is as likely to encompass information about a competitor's offerings as it is its own. As such, this site goes far beyond being an online catalog. It is truly a resource for the prepress trade.
I'll be the first to admit it. I'm lucky to have a very cool job. This past April I was hired by PrePRESS SOLUTIONS to take the helm as Senior Editor of their new Web site, PrePRESS Main Street (http://www.prepress.pps.com). After many years as a print-based writer and graphic designer, the opportunity to write (about design) online hit at the right time.
Even so, it was important to carry the unique identity created in the catalogs through to the Web site. Each PrePRESS DIRECT! catalog cover features a whimsical photo montage of the company's mannequin mascots, Ralph Repro and Cynthia Cyber. In each issue, Ralph and Cynthia tirelessly toil away in their combination electronic design studio and print shop. That same look and feel had to be driven onto PrePRESS Main Street. This was accomplished through the use of section headers in a photo montage format akin to the catalog shots.
The site is organized by section; each section has a distinct purpose and identity. In the header graphic of each of these sections, you'll find Ralph and Cynthia, either at work or play, possibly even sipping a cafe latte.
The Main Street Gazette features up-to-date news on what's happening in the graphic arts world, and includes an extensive International On-Line Newspaper Jumplist. The Gazette is updated on a daily basis, as pertinent news appears.
The Main Street Gazette Classifieds offer free ads for graphic arts employment, equipment, and business opportunities. These ads are organized by geographic location and platform.
The Convention Center is filled with on-the-scene trade show coverage, along with an industry-focused trade show calendar. The site went live with coverage of the Boston Seybold Seminars in April and made a hit at the huge Drupa printing show in Dusseldorf, Germany, in May. One month later, Main Street provided the official Web site for the Atlanta Nexpo newspaper show.
The Print Shop is where all the downloadable goodies, including PrePRESS SOLUTION's acclaimed Toolkit, Adobe's Acrobat Readers, and the Quark XTensions Download Demo Center, can be found.
The Library shelves are filled with an eclectic assortment of jumpsites and reference materials, from Dilbert to the DTP Glossary.
Cafe Moiré is the gateway to a number of prepress and DTP-related newsgroups. It's also the place where Ralph and Cynthia tank up on high-octane caffeine for those late-night design projects.
As one cruises through the site, Ralph and Cynthia's familiar, avant-garde faces are always just around the corner. They seem to pop up in all sorts of places. In fact, after you register as a member, Ralph and Cynthia are the folks who sign and send your thank-you letter!
Techie Image Stuff
Ralph Repro and Cynthia Cyber are digitally photographed for both the print catalog and the Web site. The digital photos are brought into Adobe Photoshop, where they are merged with drum scans and other images culled from CD-ROM image collections. PrePRESS Main Street takes the high-res road. It's easy to say that there are few other Web sites that go to the extravagance of drum scanning. It may seem like overkill (it is), but when images are used for both print and online mediums, it makes sense to scan only once-at high resolution-and then sample down the images once they've been retouched. This makes more sense than scanning (and retouching) twice.
When comparing process color CMYK files and GIF graphics for Web pages, the difference in file size can be in tens of megabytes. Routine GIFs should be under 50K. An 8.5" x 11" full-color catalog cover weighs in at over 30 megabytes. A conscious effort is made to minimize the size of online files.
The site uses a combination of JPEG and GIF files. JPEG is wonderful for the Web, as it packs plenty of picture into a very compressed space; unfortunately, it is not supported by all browsers. A compromise that takes into account one of the nice little features of the HTML spec-the ability to offer up both GIF and JPEG files, dependent on what the browser can handle-was agreed upon.
If a browser can handle JPEG, that's what it gets. If the browser can only accept GIF files, then that's what it gets. The JPEG files are nice, tasty images, while the GIF files are 32-color images. Consequently, the GIF images are not nearly as scrumptious, but they offer a similar file size to medium JPEG compression. Through trial and error, it was found that the medium compression settings offered the best compromise between image quality and file compression.
As mentioned earlier, the size of the graphic file is all-important. A Web site should never keep readers waiting (for a downloaded image) for any longer than is absolutely necessary. This is not to say that large photos should be avoided. They should, however, be situated in a way that ensures that the reader will know what's coming. In the early days of PrePRESS Main Street, there were a number of large GIF files loaded in as section headers. They were soon tweaked to save download time; within a month, they were replaced by new, tighter section header images.
An ongoing issue that had to be addressed was the repurposing of existing scan files. Manually converting each scan file from EPS to GIF is a time-consuming process. Equilibrium Debabelizer was considered for batch image conversions, but unfortunately, the current version of the popular file conversion software does not have the ability to open binary EPS files. When questioned, Equilibrium's technical support staff promised that the capability would be present in version 2.0, which is not due until 1996.
A solution was eventually found in the form of Daystar's PhotoMatic, a Photoshop plug-in that allows for intensive scripting and unattended batch operations.
One of the coolest features of PrePRESS Main Street is the on-the-scene trade show coverage. The site literally travels the globe to bring current coverage to its international readers. There is at least one trade show covered per month, with on-site reporting, using an Apple QuickTake digital camera to quickly capture images from the show floor. The QuickTake images are downloaded to a Powerbook 520c as PICT files. The high-resolution setting is used on the QuickTake camera, allowing eight photographs to be taken before being dumped. The files are then brought into Adobe Photoshop, where they are tweaked, scaled, cropped, and saved as GIFs. The GIF images are then incorporated into the HTML pages and uploaded to the Web site.
Needless to say, working in Photoshop on a 520c takes a little getting used to...especially if you've become accustomed to working on a 21-inch monitor and 24-bit video card. It takes a little faith and a lot of luck.
Veteran image tweakers will tell you there are two common tricks to making GIF images more civilized. The first is to save the images as interlaced files. With an intelligent browser, interlaced GIF images will fly in-first at lower resolution-and quickly tighten up and come into focus as the image data is received from the host.
The second way to spiff up GIFs is to save them with transparency. This makes irregularly shaped objects seem to float on the page. Transparent GIFs are particularly impressive when floating on a background texture. Add a tasteful soft drop shadow, and the effect is positively three-dimensional. Due to time constraints in the coverage of the site's first two shows, Seybold and Drupa, the QuickTake shots were not saved as interlaced files. However, interlaced GIFs are used when time allows.
Perhaps the best way to understand how all this comes together is to experience the site. You're cordially invited to come and spend some time on PrePRESS Main Street. See the site, rummage through the library, and blast off with the jumplists! In future columns we'll cruise through many more well-designed sites, and delve into the ways their Webmasters create intricate pages.