One Print, Two Print, Red Print, Blue...

Experience is something you get just after the moment when you needed it the most.

I've had InDesign for several years. I thought I knew what it was all about. I didn't. But I know a few more things now.

The first couple of pages of printing the portfolio were wonderful. It was exciting. But then came the red pages...

All of a sudden, everything I printed had a dreadful red cast. And so I started searching for the reason. The weekend went from exciting to frustrating in the time it took to make a print.

I had used InDesign in the past and thought it was ready to rock. But Adobe sent out an update and it seems that all of my links were broken. I fixed those - and that's when the redness set in.

I had never actually printed from InDesign before, I would create my document, convert it to a pdf and ship it. If it looked good on the calibrated monitor, it was going to be great where ever the pdf went. I thought about filling one of the printer's ink cartriges with Visine (to get the red out), but I would have had to buy a whole case.

After a couple hours of tinkering, phone calling and manual reading I found the right switch to flip and voila! We were good to go. But now I was out of ink.

The ink store opened at 8 a.m. I bought the magenta cartrige and rushed back to the office. I slapped it in hit "print" and the next print came out upside down.

A brown van is scheduled to stop in front of my office in the next couple of days. The driver will ask me to sign something and he will hand me a fresh pack of paper. It's MOAB Entrada. Bright white and 100% cotton. This isn't a homemade portfolio, it's handcrafted and worth all of this effort. Maybe next week I'll be able to show it.