Investigate the Role of Prepress as It Affects the Overall Print Production Quality in Somolu, Lagos, Nigeria

Abstract

Prepress is an integral part of print production process which must be appropriately done in order to have quality prints. It includes planning of layout, determining the paper sizes that would go with a particular job, image areas, margin, colour (RGB or CMYK), the gripping of the printing machine, grains direction of paper or card, colour guide (Pantone), plates, image resolution/compression of the entire artwork, exporting method, bleeding, binding/collating method, folding, suggestion for the type of machine to be used, type of finishing required. Prepress in print production cannot be under estimated. It must be accurately done so as to make the final printed material looks impeccable and attractive. Prepress technically, can help to detect huge printing errors on time, it can also help to determine how final job will look like in terms of size, quality and precision. However, due to the negative stereotypes faced by the printers in Somolu based on their printing works, the investigation becomes imperative to know how prepress affects the overall print production process. Somolu printing works are usually referred to as “Somolu Prints”. This statement is often negatively used by some corporate print patrons and some members of the public to denote inferior or low-quality prints most especially in offset lithographic printing. Investigation by the researcher reveals that this is not true about the whole printers in Somolu. Against this backdrop, the researcher feels it is necessary to assess prepress aspect of print production to know its impacts on the whole process based on graphic design principles whether the printers put it into consideration in Somolu. In this research work, survey method was used and the analysis was done using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) tool (descriptive statistics including simple percentages, frequencies, mean and standard deviation) were used to analyse the data.