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Rods and Cones assists clients with their workflow and color management needs
By LaShell Stratton
Print providers hate to hear clients complain that the brochure or postcard they proofed online looks nothing like the printed product delivered to the office. “The red in a headline is too dark,” the client says. The skin tones of the smiling models seem just a little too blue. After all that time spent tweaking the color quality, the customer is unhappy with the final product.
The principals at Rods and Cones say there is a way to fix this problem, but the answer isn’t as simple as buying color management software. It’s buying the right software for your system and organizing your print workflow for optimal results. For the past 10 years, the Santa Cruz, Calif. consultants have analyzed the color management needs of print distributors and manufacturers, advertising firms, photography studios, corporations and government agencies, and have developed efficient digital workflow solutions that save labor hours.
Often, color management testing on site is required, aided by research the staff does at its California lab.
“We handle whatever our client’s color management needs are,” says Son Do, co-founder and technical officer. “If it’s a printer, we will address their pre-press needs. If it’s a designer, we address their desktop needs. Many times we have to address the needs of more than just their internal color management. Sometimes they’ll say, ‘It’s working great within the company, but when it leaves here we have problems.’ We have to handle their vendors both upstream and downstream.”
And that means everything from the photographers to the designers to the manufacturer.
Do says a common problem “is that now color management is very well known. The technology is much more available and integrated into the system. But there seems to be little interoperability.”
An Infant Named “Color Management”
When Rods and Cones began, color management didn’t appeal to many clients because of the technology’s newness and its price tag. “When the company started 10 years ago, color management was in its infancy,” says Erica Aitken, co-founder and president of Rods and Cones. “At the time technology was very difficult to learn and it was buggy. It was also very expensive to implement.”
But the market for consultants that could help studios with their color management was still there. “The genesis of the company started with graphic designers,” Do explains. “In the beginning, when they were converting from film to digital files, photographers and designers really struggled with color management.”
Aitken was able to fuse her background as a designer and production manager with Do’s background as a scientific researcher who understood the inner workings of color management technology to devise a method to help clients as varied as Tiffany & Co. and the California National Guard make what they see on screen the same as what arrived from the printer. The staff at Rods and Cones calls itself “workflow architects,” but the company really acts as a guide through the color management jungle.
“You have to wade through the technology overflow,” Do says. “There are just so many programs that advertise color management. Color management is like a religion; there’s no right way to do it.”
Finding the Right Method
But there can be a better way, depending on the company. With each new client, Rods and Cones first tries to establish what the client “sees as their problem,” Aitken says.
“When the company started 10 years ago, color management was in its infancy. At the time, technology was very difficult to learn and it was buggy.
It was also very expensive
to implement.”
Erica Aitken, Co-founder and President Rods and Cones, Santa Cruz, Calif.
“You have to wade through the technology overflow. There are just so many programs that advertise color management.
Color management is like
a religion; there’s no right way to do it.”
Son Do, Co-founder and Technical Officer Rods and Cones, Santa Cruz, Calif.
“We always have a conversation on the phone first,” she says. “We want to hear about the technology they have. We want to hear about their staff.”
She says they usually go to the client’s shop or facility and “do a study on their workflow and create a report that will apprise us of what technology they will need to purchase and what they need to do with their staffing.”
After the report is complete, Rods and Cones helps the client implement the recommendations.
For a smaller job, the consultation is less extensive. “We don’t have to commission a study,” Aitken explains. “We can just talk on the phone and do one visit and pretty much make our recommendation based on that.”
Aitken argues that the added value of using consultants rather than seeking out color management software is “we can secure the best prices for them and establish contact with their vendors.”
Though Rods and Cones does not have exclusive agreements with any software providers, it does favor products by X-Rite and gretagmacbeth. They also prefer software platforms by Apple and Adobe.
And once all the software is installed, “we’re extremely conscientious about the follow-through,” Do says. “We stay in touch with our clients for months or for years after the initial consultation. We’re not going to leave them hanging 10 days later and say, ‘Sorry, your warranty’s over.’ Usually after the first installation, they’re pretty happy. But over time they start to understand the technology better, get more sophisticated in their expectations and we may have to go in and make some changes.”
Now the company is expanding into other areas to better fit the needs of their clients. Aitken says they are now working on ways for packaging companies to better match the color of packages to their clients’ products “which is very challenging.”
Last year the retail giant Spiegel Brands Inc. commissioned Rods and Cones to do an ROI study of its in-house prepress and production system. The workflow consultants helped to create a new infrastructure that will ultimately save Spiegel Brands more than $2.8 million a year in direct costs, according Rods and Cones.
“Spiegel produces a lot of printing,” explains Son Do, co-founder and technical officer at Rods and Cones. “They do about 50 main catalog mailings a year and there are significant color considerations. They are not only concerned with the look of the fabric in the catalogs but also the flesh. After all, this is fashion photography.”
Rods and Cones was asked to help condense all Spiegel’s catalog brands into one workflow process that would fall under a new creative and production team instead of many teams as it had in the past. It would also be produced on the same equipment and through the same interfaces.
Erica Aitken, co-founder and president of Rods and Cones, says her company helped install a network of Apple G5 computers and integrated the new Adobe Creative Suite 2 for retouch and page design. “We partnered with [the technology company] NAPC to install a customized media asset management system by Xinet which enables our client to access and use their assets easily and in real time,” she says. “Because color management is our specialty, we recommended and installed Epson 7800s with EFI ColorProof XF RIPS.”
All of Spiegel Brands’ printing is outsourced. To complete the makeover process, Rods and Cones also had to work with the Spiegel Brands’ print vendor to develop a proof that works with their presses. They decided to integrate the Kodak Creo Prinergy backend workflow for PDF file delivery.
“The printer has a print quality consumer program that is largely underutilized,” Do says. “They tell you the standards to follow and what specifications they are using. By understanding and working with the compliance department, we could produce better quality proofs."
LaShell Stratton is assistant editor at Print Solutions magazine. Email comments to lstratton@PSDA.org.