We, the founders of Kreata Estudio are «old school», yes, we have our years. Our training was done on paper, with glue, spray glue? no! liquid glue that we took out of a can and we stained our hands. We knew the cutter, the assembly of projects on cardboard to present them to the client and the «shirts» to cover that work … and at what point we went to have our face in a screen all day … even we do not know, we feel it was from one day to another. When we started as designers, the internet existed only for a privileged few, not everyone could handle design programs: CorelDraw and PageMaker (by the way, I heard that CorelDraw launched its 2021 suite… personally, I think it will never be able to raise its head against Adobe), being a designer was a privileged position for a few.

At that time there were many jobs and they were clearly divided, the photographer did not mark typography, the trainer did not make negatives, the designer did not touch the printing plates. There was classified work and each one respected his stages in the line of work. Nowadays, not only photographers take pictures, we all take pictures, edit pictures, retouch pictures, publish pictures, invent hashtags, put them to music and launch them on social networks … Why not!

But it was not only graphic design that changed, the world changed and we have become multitasking, we can design logos, edit web pages online, download videos, make blogs, vlogs and podcasts! the internet is no longer a privilege for a few, that’s already a few decades ago, so … have we become old? it depends… in that well-defined chain of work, many businesses and specific activities died, others adapted, they got on the internet, they got into programming, they went from traditional illustration to digital illustration, from text marking and analog photography to editorial editing and digital publishing, we still use paper, but we opt for FSC certified papers, we still print, but we do digital prepress, in graphic design we have not grown old, we have adapted, we have opened our minds to the new possibilities of digital resolution and while we continue on this path, we will never be old.

Most of the world uses A4 size (21 x 21.7 cm) and a few countries, including our neighbors USA and Canada, use letter size (21.5 x 28 cm). Being our trading partners, it is natural that we have adopted the same size in Mexico. It is evident that this small size is the size in which the double letter, tabloid, oversize tabloid, and printing paper sheets will later be deployed.

It is also true that it is necessary to check before printing on what paper we will have our printed material. Does the paper we want come in sheets or in reels? In large volume printing, we do not want to pay and throw away kilos and kilos of paper waste.

That is why we choose line papers, because there is already some security in supply and measures, a problem arises when we want to use exceptional papers, for example, the Forest Stewardship Council FSC certified papers come from Europe and that means that we must adapt our formats to avoid shrinkage. Here the rule of «I study graphic design because I am not good at mathematics» is broken.

The graphic designer or visual communicator who overlooks this and designs annual reports, art books, brochures or even complete campaigns without thinking about extended measurements and final measurements based on the paper supplier or the many papers they have chosen, is in serious trouble. At the end of the day, our client trusts us to be the experts and we must be careful, not only in the creation and conception of a logo, or a corporate image, we must think about the final prints, even if we are not the ones who will print. Let’s not leave this problem to someone else.

So, to measure, add and subtract, before designing.