Current mood:

annoyed

Small Business Solutions
Lately I have been working for a small restaurant near my college. We are doing business on the basis of service exchange: I get to send my mate over there to eat when I don't feel like cooking over the winter. I get store credit equal to the amount of cash I would have charged for my services. So far I've made a small website and a new Menu, for which I charged 65$ altogether. I know it is very under-priced, but I guess I have personal motives for the success of the business, or at least I do now. As I've worked with the mostly technically illiterate staff, except for the 15 year old who has the business computer running as a Halo and chat station, we've become quite friendly. Also, I try to spend my money and time on local businesses to keep them in the community instead of them trickling away through all the corporations that come to Albuquerque for the cheapest minimum wage in the country.

On the 30th of November the owner called me and said, "I need a new Menu, you can have it done yesterday or the day before." I replied that I would start on it right away so she could examine the rough draft tomorrow morning before business hours and we could discuss printing options. The person who was previously working on the desktop publishing needs of the business was fired and left. I've inherited the files he left behind. All of them contained impossible fonts, spelling, and typographical errors. The menu he had was also hard to read and over cluttered with template-like promotional cut outs. Why would you want the customer to cut apart the menu? Those sorts of things really out to printed separate from the menu. To correct these problems and make the revisions and additions that the owner requested, I ended up starting over.

First I made all the corrections, additions, and revisions to the asset file for the menu, then I decided that it would be easiest to work in Illustrator. Illustrator has several useful features for print layout, even though it is used mostly for making vector graphics. Since it was such a small project I could use the features Illustrator offered, and not have to break out InDesign. InDesign is desktop publishing software of excellent quality, however, I have less experience with that program than Illustrator. I decided on an elegant Palintino Linotype for the main font, and an optically kerned brush script for the title. The previous title was done in an impossible bold and italic script that wasn't kerned at all. I updated the web page with the new fonts after I added the title. The rest of the menu fell into place with ease, and I made some small attractive graphics for the footers. After reading a few articles on good menu layout from restaurant.com I decided to put the best selling items (breakfast) in the front and cash cows (catering) in the back. Most people don't read menus, they scan them. So you have to analyze your menu from the perspective of how the eye travels through it.

The next morning I went to the FedExKinko's on Central near Girard to get some price estimations on printing costs, and to print some business cards I designed for my mate. The staff were slow to be of assistance, and the computer rentals only offered 56k modems with which to retrieve your files for printing. At a charge of .20 cents a minute it took 5 dollars to retrieve and print a 700kb PDF. There was one computer, a wintel design station with more capabilities, however it was crowded with Scrap Book Moms trying to learn Photoshop Elements. The staff were quite willing to assist them for .20 cents a minute, for what seemed like hours. When I asked if I could get the cards printed on perforated card stock, the staff ignored me and told me that they need me to pay an extra fee to print the cards from a color printed sheet on regular paper, so they could scan it and print it on the cards stock. After I did as requested, I decided I was only going to buy 1 sheet of business cards and get out of there. The cards I got looked pretty bad, one of them was illegible. By forcing a print from a low DPI printer and then making a scan to reprint on the card stock, they had completely degraded my design. I had made the file a PDF specifically so they could use it on their computers to print from. It looked pixelated and rough, even though I used no bitmaps whate-so-ever for that reason (and costs of course). The they told me that I could feel free to use the self-service station to cut them myself. That took 20 minutes, and it was a good thing I am quite good with a cutter from my experience matting my art pieces.

I went to check price estimations in their desk catalog I found that they only cater to large businesses and their lowest document order was 1000 prints, b&w, for 550$. They of course, offered design services for like (these are ballpark) 75$/an-hour 25$ minimum, and 10$ and hour for any typesetting that needed to be fixed taking longer than 10 minutes. I gasped thinking about the 10$ an hour I was expected to receive being an entry-level ink plate cleaner when I graduated with my two degrees in business graphics and cross-media production so far with, and hopefully continued, 4.0. That information was provided by a pamphlet from my college.

Later, due to a lack of anything resembling a print house within walking distance of the business, and my apartment, I had to go back. I decided we would print some test color copies and see if the owner liked them. I went with an employee and representative of the owner. This time I couldn't retrieve my documents at all because their whole Internet was down, and all the staff were busy working on a machine that wasn't charging people to use the computer. Nice priorities. I tried to get assistance three times. I was there for an hour trying to get help. We ended up just leaving, and decided to try again somewhere else tomorrow. I had never been so embarrassed in front of a client.