Listed in no particular order:

1. Saddle Stitching
I’m petty sure I drove the two guys that ran the presses crazy with asking anything I didn’t know, and this was yet another one of them. To me, saddle stitching is a way to bind a brochure or book that makes it look like they just stapled it. What’s the difference? Staples are pre-shaped metal objects with points that are pushed through the paper, and curled over at the ends. Saddle stitching is just a wire that comes on a spool, and the booklet is placed onto a ‘saddle’ where the wire is stitched through it, and then cut to resemble a staple. By not having to have the wire be pre-formed, it’s supposedly slightly cheaper than staples.

2. Presentation Counts
Eve when delivering final stationery to a client, the most important thing to do was to package it properly. Be sure all of the paper lined up nicely in the box the client would open. It doesn’t change the look of the product any, but it changes the perception the client has of it when they first see it.

3. Don’t Design Like a Printer
One of the press operators was a former graphic design major, and one day told me he didn’t think he could design anymore because he thought like a printer. He then explained that anytime he looked at a design, he could only think of the difficult parts to print, and how he could alter it to make it easier. This was always for the sake of printing, not for the sake of design. As I code a lot of my own websites, I try to remember this lesson. I think it’s a benefit to know different aspects of how a project comes to life, but try not to worry about them too much, it puts too many restrictions on what you may want to do in the design stages.

4. Ask Questions
Sometimes you even get answers. I learned more about setting up files for printing from the people running the presses than from my classes. I also learned more about dealing with print issues this way.

5. Know Your Client
Clients can be great to work with. Just like everyone else, each one is unique, and have different expectations. The one client I worked with was more concerned with typos than anything else, and thankfully someone told me this in advance. After handing the client the first draft of a 20+ page booklet, and not having a single misspelled word in it (note: you won’t get that from a blog post I write 10 minutes before hitting ‘publish’), the working relationship started on great terms.

Unfortunately, I didn’t spend much more than a summer working there, but also having the first truly collaborative projects with other designers left me with what I considered a successful time there. Just because you have a job that you don’t plan on being at long, don’t think you can’t make the most of it.