I am a DTP relic (dating back to the early 90s) who can no longer be referred to as a "graphic designer", since all creative juices have long since been drained from me inner being. For the past 7 years I have worked in-house for professional service organizations. A growing frustration I have is with the staff members who request artwork from me. Since everyone is a graphic artist--tools of their trade being MS Word, clipart library, Google images and their expert use of "cut & paste"--I have been reduced to the supplier of logos. Unfortunately, even with this simple task my qualifications are questioned daily when I e-mail the requesting party an eps logo or a tiff image. They "can not open the file." In the world of MS Word users, the Insert>Picture is not a function normally used. Instead users copy low-res jpegs and gifs from the web and other Word docs and past them over-and-over into new Word docs. Then they print their poor quality graphics--often proportionately distorted--to the firm's new, expensive 1200+ dpi, postscript printers.

Now I don't expect that this practice will change amongst these self-proclaimed techies, but for my own sanity I would love to be able to reference some posted articles authored by industry professionals which explain best practices for graphics and the "why" behind them. Can anyone direct me to some published works which briefly describe the "how" and "why" in the language of a Microsoft/PC user?

Ksharp there are a few professionals here at this forum that will join up in your cry.

The subject of stupid practices of clients is always a riot here, and I am sure the likes of Freakyclean one of our resident pre-press gurus will be able to enlighten you further..oh and welcome to the board. :)

Are you looking for a book or a website?

For books...

Adobe used to have a really good book called the Adobe Publishing Guide or some such name which shipped with Pagemaker (pre InDesign) and was about 50 pages and was very helpfull.

Adobe also published a book called the Adobe Print Publishing Guide at one point but I don't know if that is still in circulation either.

Other books that may be usefull are the Pocket Pal book by International Papers (available from Amazon last I checked) it goes through the whole history of printing and has some helpfull diagrams and such. There is also the Pocket Guide to Digital Pre-Press which can also be quiet helpfull.

As to addressing the MS word and Publisher crowd, I don't know of a book which can help them. The kind of help they need can only be administered on a leather couch by the likes of Freud.

It's kind of hard to battle the MS propaganda machine. Publisher has got to be for publishing book right? Why else would it be called publisher. It's what all the professionals use right? Why does it have this output for Service Bureau button if you can't use the files?

What do you mean there is no way to save my Publisher file so you can use it?

I got it off a website what do you mean the quality is too low?
followed by: It looks good on my screen

you should teach these guys to respect your kind...taking credit out of your work is bad enough, but continuously degrading it because of their lack of understanding is simply outrageous...i symphatize with you man.