I want to print these business cards but I don't know anything about templates!

[Nimisha]

This suddenly came to me this morning, a good two years after it happened. There was a whole lot of other suck surrounding this woman, so this story was drowned out by it.

My first (and only non-friend) dive into doing web design for a client I ended up with a complete troll of a woman who knew only enough to be dangerous about computers as near as I could tell. Could barely work photoshop, so her "photo manipulation" pics were what you'd see over on Weddinator. But hey, I'm here to design, not judge right?

As a favor I did up her business cards with the logo I'd designed as part of the package contract early and agreed to help her get them printed (luckily I had covered my ass with them not being paid for yet). The story revolves around the exciting journey in getting this very simple design printed.

She was going to print them from her home computer, fine. I asked her what the template number was, and that it'd be up at the top corner of the packaging.

I get back an email telling me the dimensions of the cards. Why yes! Those are the standard dimensions of a business card! Congratulations on not buying a retarded size of card that won't fit in people's wallet!

I email her back saying that in order to make them print accurately the template size will go a long way. She emails me back with "Ok"

Fine, I go online and find the standard size and do it up in a PDF. I email it to her and explain that it needs to be printed without margins, and if she needs help setting that up let me know. I also reiterate that without knowing exactly which cards she's using I can't be sure this will work, and the template number will ensure I have it right.

I get an email back littered with exclamation points saying that it's all squished in the middle and none of the cards are right. I email back instructions on how to print a PDF without margins for XP, and asked her to try again and let me know if it's off, as without the number from the packaging I can't guarantee it will line up.

Try #2 is slightly more successful. They're "off a bit". Gee thanks for the descriptive explanation! After emailing her back she does tell me the amount it's off and I'm able to fix it. I ask her to print another test, and hopefully this would fix it.

Try #3 comes back a few days later. More exclamation points about how I ruined all her cards. Evidently she did off 15 (so she says) sheets, and they were still off a couple of mm. Now, it was a white background card, so all this would do was make the centering a tiny bit off. But the icing on this cat-dragged-home-look-what-I-killed-for-you-aren't-I-a-good-kitty-oh-wait-its-not-dead-and-is-now-flying-into-the-window cake was still to come. At the end of the email she adds. "The template is XXXX, maybe now you can do it right!" Which I did, and I assumed she printed off the rest of them fine as I didn't hear back about them.

Do people think we're asking for this stuff out of laziness? If someone is doing your floors do you refuse to tell them how big they are and ask them to guess?


I did get a bit of vindication. When she decided at the end that she didn't want the website and wasn't paying a dime, I had the joy of reminding her that she hadn't paid for the card design yet either so she couldn't use aaaaaaall those cards she printed I gave the design to a couple of my friends who were getting married so they could keep an eye out for them, but she seemed to have been smart enough to actually not use them.

Actually, a quick search seems to point to her not being in the business anymore. Darn

[Dips]

Ain't it the truth?

We get far more , lack of cooperation, entitlement and whining from people over the stuff we give away for FREE than we ever get over the stuff we charge good money for.

[TheRabbi]

I remember reading on one or another of those Lifehackeresque sites that it's better to charge a dollar for something than to give it away for free because of the respective attitudes it engenders.

I have a graphic designer friend who I will ask to take a look at my website designs and give m critiques, but I always try to be careful to remember that, even though she's doing it because we're friends and she wants to, I'm using her expertise for free.

[MoonCat]

Ain't it the truth?

We get far more , lack of cooperation, entitlement and whining from people over the stuff we give away for FREE than we ever get over the stuff we charge good money for.

Too true! We get so many more whiny, bitchy calls from people about their free ads than we do about the ones that cost money! You'd think it was the end of the world if one of those ads doesn't make it into the paper, and customers expect to get the sun, moon and stars for free. My favorite part of this job is deleting 3/4 of the text they send because it won't fit into the three-line maximum size for the freebies.

[EvilEmpryss]

You have way more patience than I do, Nimisha. I've done print-at-home business cards, and they can be hard enough to do when you have the template from the company to work with and you know what you're doing. I can't imagine trying to do it without knowing the template number or being able to see the printed result.

And anyone who doesn't print a test on a blank piece of paper and lay it over the card stock to make sure it lines up is just asking for a ruined batch of cards.

[Andara Bledin]

And anyone who doesn't print a test on a blank piece of paper and lay it over the card stock to make sure it lines up is just asking for a ruined batch of cards.

A thousand times this.

I never do a print job that involves special paper without doing a dry run first to ensure that the spacing is correct.

^-.-^

[Ironclad Alibi]

I never do a print job that involves special paper without doing a dry run first to ensure that the spacing is correct.

In addition to that, I also run a single sheet of the special paper though first to make sure differences in the paper don't change any spacings. (This can happen when the regular paper is in one tray, and the special paper is in a second tray or other feed slot.) Only after I have a correct printout on the special paper will I print multiple sheets.