Complaint Dept.

I do a great deal of freelance design work for a publisher that does a great deal of business with a vendor that provides print-on-demand services. That's essentially a digital printing process, not all that different from, say, printing pages on a laser printer. The resulting quality tends to be hit-and-miss (photos and illustrations suffer the most), but I try to work within those limitations.

The covers, though, are virtually indistinguishable from a book printed by traditional methods — colors are sharp and vibrant, the card stock substantial and glossy.

I received a box of comps (or complimentary copies) of the books I had worked on today, my first opportunity to see the work I'd done on these particular projects in print. I was disappointed to discover that the print vendor is now trimming the books about a sixteenth of an inch less wide than they're supposed to be. That, and they seem to be using a slightly lighter weight of paper, which causes the spine of the cover to wrap around the front cover just a bit. What this all means is that the front covers are, when all is said and done, almost an eighth of an inch more narrow than I had expected.

The print vendor provides template files for the covers (set up to automate the process, for them, as much as possible), which I'm obligated to follow. But they haven't updated the template to reflect the changes in the way they're printing and trimming these books.

An eighth of an inch might not sound like much (and I suppose it isn't), but when I design a cover, I tend to be very particular and precise about where and how I place everything. It's frustrating to have put so much work into a project, only to be disappointed by the results. Even if most people wouldn't notice, I know I will.