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To: Jim McMannis who wrote (11895)	7/31/2003 10:55:36 AM
From: GraceZ	Respond to of 306849

I've worked on one photographic book that was printed in China. It was designed here and only the offset printing and binding was done in China. Unfortunately I didn't go on that press check. Frankly I was disappointed in the quality, but then it's rare that I'm not disappointed in what the offset guys do to my work. The price was good, Almost 100% of what I work on is designed and printed within the US except the magazine ads which go all over the world. The big offset printing houses are hurting not from Mexico or China, but from the fact that so much of what they used to do can be done in house on copy equipment or can be taken to somewhere like Kinkos. Then a great deal of the high end stuff when to the web and is distributed in the form of PDFs. Then there are guys like me who are eating into their press press income because they are completely unprepared to handle files from high end digital cameras. I don't work on much that gets turned into packaging. My thinking that kind of printing is what is going off shore and has been for a long time. Something like Avon is 80% packaging cost. I work on ads and communications pieces and it is hard to send that design off shore simply because design is one of those things that is uniquely tied to one's own culture. Not only that, it's hard to find a non-native speaker of a language who would pick up on all the mistakes that inevitably show up in a printed piece. I can't tell you how many jobs I got in Spanish (used to do a lot of display work for Social Security) that had grievous errors in them that got all the way to being displayed before someone caught it (not my yab). That's why it's reasonably easy to catch the foreign knockoffs. The hang tags have spelling and grammar errors.

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (11895)	7/31/2003 1:44:36 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

*OT**I thought about something else. Most big printing facilities are located near the big paper houses and the paper houses are located near pulp and ample supplies of water. On the East Coast that means New England. Mexico doesn't strike me as being the kind of place which answers those needs. If you notice when you go there, almost everything is printed on the cheapest low grade paper made. Although you'd think anything that can be shipped to San Diego can be sent down to Mexico as well. Since paper frequently isn't even manufactured until you order it these days, the time lag might offset whatever labor costs there are. When you pay for offset printing you are covering the huge costs of capital equipment involved. The small presses don't have that anymore because they make so many little machines now which are quite reasonable but those big web presses have a cost to run that is so high that only the biggest runs are worth doing on them, every hour of press time is carefully scheduled way in advance so there is zero idle time. Because of that, I get rush jobs on projects that are in the works for months. If they miss their press window it is an expensive mistake. It's this time element which keeps offset printing and designers close to each other. OTOH big photographic books are frequently printed abroad simply because the cost to print them here is sometimes equal to what they can sell them wholesale. That's why so many are printed with grants, they're a money losing operation which would never be accomplished if they were dependant on profits. What is funny is that a lot are printed in Japan and Europe which are two places which have higher labor costs than we do but they have more money sloshing around for art photography.