Margie Dana

If you're a print customer in New England, I hope you can join us on March 21 for a first-ever printer panel. "Meet the Press!" will showcase three successful commercial printing firms.

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Professional print buyers recognize certain traits in themselves. Many buyers share a love of typography. Most buyers have a knack for identifying colors by their PMS equivalents. ("Hey, hon, did you take my PMS 444 suit to the cleaners last week?")

So I thought it would be an interesting exercise to gather some tell-tale signs of being a professional print buyer. I asked buyers to finish this thought, and I want to thank all of you who did:

"You know you're a print buyer when (or if). . .

• Your boyfriend picks up on the fact that while going through your mail, you critique it like you are on a press check.

• You find yourself proofing your US Weekly, realizing the 2-page spread on Britney and Paris is out of register!

• On a very cold morning in January, you're driving to yet another "sunrise special" press check - and the moon is going down through the windshield while the sun is coming up in the review mirror

• You are more puzzled than annoyed by how the Globe curls at the corners these days, and spend time speculating about the reasons. At first you thought your copy may have been printed on the end of the roll, right before the automatic roll-splicer did its thing. But now you are willing to lay odds that, in an effort to save $$, the Globe started using a lighter weight newsprint, and that one of the unintended consequences of this cheaper paper is that it curls on the corners. Every day. Every copy. This is another sad reminder of the economic pressure daily newspapers are under.

• Your skin crawls when you hear a vendor say "value added."

• For press checks, you add at least an hour to when the printer estimates the sheet will be ready.

• You have to be "the bad guy" when dealing with designers who want to push the envelope.

• You analyze your mail for print techniques and quality.

• Printers send you Christmas cards!

• You feel your junk mail rather than read it.

• You can sleep anywhere because you've been around long before "Customer Lounges" were installed at a printer.

• No one appreciates your skill and knowledge (it's all magic, right?).

• The first thing you think when someone says PMS is pantone matching system, not…well, you know.

• You start to recognize out-of-register printing without a loupe.

• You carefully examine your junk mail for design ideas, print quality, content and mailing methods before throwing it out.

• You get excited when your copy of the Boston Globe has a roll-splice in it.

• You find yourself sticking your nose (literally!) into a book or magazine because you like the smell of ink on paper.

• You spend time at Barnes & Noble running your fingers over special finishing or peeling back jackets to get a closer look at the case binding;

• You find yourself sniffing books (see above) or taking off your glasses and looking at a book from about an inch away to see if it's a duotone, tritone, or a 4/C rendering of a BW image or

• If you bore your wife to tears talking about the handwork required on a pop-up book.

• You smile when you run across a typo or an error of any kind that has made it into a finished product that is in your hands.

• Instead of reading the back of the cereal box at breakfast, you study the color bars on the box flaps.

I would say that if you recognize yourself while reading this list, congratulations, you're a Print Buyer!

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