[kaboom]

My company, American Color Packaging, is looking for a Mac professional and we're looking to hire ASAFP.

A good candidate will be throughly familiar with Illustrator 8 and higher, comfortable in Photoshop, Freehand, and Quark.
We use, almost exclusively, Illustrator 8 and 10.
OSX experience is a definite plus since we've just recently moved to all OSX.
Any familiarity with flexo printing would be a great plus as well.

We're located in Exton, Pa, right off of Rt 30 just past Rt 100.

If you're interested, please send your resum� to [email protected] or:
American Color Packaging
Attn: Jim Leek Re: Mac Position
465 Creamery Way
Exton PA, 19341-2508

Or if you have any questions about the position you can email me kevb AT Mac DOT com (you'd basically be working with me).

Jim Leek is my boss. He does the hiring so I can't tell you what the kind of salary to expect, though I can say that they do pay very well if you're experienced.

Mods, if this is inappropriate for this forum I apologize. We're just getting really desperate and I thought this would be a good place to find a good Mac Prepress guy.

[Corys]

if you are looking for prepress people, you might want to post this at:
www.prepressforums.com too

/plug

[nycdunz]

what exactly does a prepress person do? just sends stuff to the printers all day long? im a designer, and was wondering if its easy since i already know most of those apps

[Corys]

depending on what type of shop you are at, the prepress "person" could wear a lot of hats..

prepping client files for your output device

trapping (even with automatic trapping nowadays, you still need to have a human touch with some decisions)

imposition (includes looking at a layout and deciding what will go on gripper end for the pressman)

Technology research

part time customer service rep (I have found clients love to pick our brains for information and buying decisions)

A good prep person needs to know more than just the programs. A strong foundation in the pressroom and bindery is a grea bonus. Awesome troubleshooting skills too!

[almaink]

And maintain and repair systems and hardware have knowledge of stripping techniques be-able to color correct and many more things. Most times ads for Prepress jobs have a tag line "no Designers please".
almaink

[bluedog]

I have a job in the 'art department' of a flexographic label printing company. Its narrow-web printing so we aren't printing newspaper editions or other large format printing.

In my prepress duties I do manual trapping mostly in Adobe Illustrator. Color correction and applying curves to customer art, light typesetting and some minimal design or tweaking of customer art on request.

Since we are a small/medium shop, I also do creative marketing such as packaging and magazine ads for our own products we sell. For customer work, we try and stay away from doing any design -- most customers are a pain if they have the printer to the design and want changes up until past their deadlines.

Its best to keep creative work out of the prepress side of things. The real goal of a prepress operator is to make the printing process on the press as seamless as possible. This means troubleshooting files from customers, ripping film and making printing plates in many shops. When trapping requires minor tweaking of a file, the goal is to make the minimal changes necessary without affecting the general look of the piece. Often it involves researching the new technologies to make the process easier/faster/more cost effective.

From my experience in this job, it lends itself best for someone who really like to troubleshoot and enjoys the technical aspects of printing. I think of most jobs as a 'puzzle' and its quite fun to put all the pieces together. This is quite opposite to my work as a graphic designer, where there was more work on the creative side of things. If every designer/creative had the experience of a prepress person it would be invaluable in time savings and keeping costs down. I think the experience of actually doing the RIPping and separations and trapping can make me a better designer.

Since I tend to enjoy the technical aspects of design, my strengths make it really great working in a prepress environment. I wear the hat of creative on our internal projects and maintain and expand our website and server maintenance.