A local informational newpaper (Farm and Dairy lol) is hiring a Graphic Designer/Layout designer and the big thing is it doesn't specify experience.

Anyway enough rambling :) Long story short I don't have my final portfolio finished so I have to rush and print something to show tomorrow. I'm printing on 11x17 stock and the printer makes .25" margins. Should I crop off and have a little wiggle room in the sleeve (11x14 folio) or should I leave the white margins on there? Also the backing inside the sleeve is black.

Any comments are much appreciated, I have to get these printed off tonight and am laying everything out in indesign as I speak. (first time around was in photoshop :/ ) I will prob. be heading off to print at 7 or 8pm...as of now I am just going to crop them off but wasn't sure what was the best to do. Also to see the pieces going in theres a link in my sig...the one I would be most worried about is the mostly black mozart poster in there, not sure if white edges would clash.

whatever way you decide to go, keep it uniform. don't switch it up at all.

if you are going to keep the width of the page, you might want to think about giving it a set border width, like .5" and keep it consistent on all pieces. this way it looks like you designed it that way, and not that you didn't have a choice printing on a non-borderless fiery.

*if you're gonna fill the whole page every time, then try a .5" border all around.

Thanks KR1156,

I did decide to just trim them off. The interview went well but found out that the job required 50% data imput.....converting faxed text into type for there ad's and stuff......Blah. He did however seem interested in my folio and said he would call me in again if another position came up for just graphic design.

i started out as a mechanical artist. does suck, but i put together some extremely tough POP & DM stuff, so i am grateful for all the production/cmyk knowledge i got from it. also knowing indesign/illustrator inside out.

Yea I can see where that could be extremely helpfull, becuase when I first went to school I never thought about how they where going to end up printed eventually, I see a lot of design positions that like you to have pre-press knowledge.

I am planning on going prepress first just because jobs are more plentiful here, theres also a pro only color lab that does production type retouching so i'll try there too.

just go somewhere where you'll get well rounded experience. learn a bit of EVERYTHING. that will make it easier to find your niche.

i see a lot of designers trying to tackle pre-press work, not always successfully...