Frequently Asked Questions
My production manager wants me to subscribe to Blinkplan for her. What makes it worth my money?
- Blinkplan saves time, allowing your production manager or art director (whoever is responsible for pagination on your magazine) more time for productivity in other areas.
- Once it knows your section sizes, Blinkplan guards against book-size errors.
- Using the section sizes specified by the user, Blinkplan automatically calculates stitch-in locations, meaning fewer expensive mistakes at the printers.
- By automatically calculating totals of page types, errors can be picked up – for example, if an ad has accidentally been excluded.
Will my online Blinkplan be secure, or will my competition be able to get their hands on it?
The Blinkplan server is completely secure and password-protected, Plus, the unique url for viewing any particular issue can only be used for that issue, and no future issues.
How many flatplans does it store?
At any given time, three flatplans can be stored and worked on.
What if I want to keep my pagination plans for longer than three months?
For a fee of $10 per month, three extra months’ plans can be stored on our server. Another option is saving to your desktop all the PDFs generated by Blinkplan.com. You won’t be able to amend these, but will be able to keep record of the pagination of all the issues you have already printed.
Weekly magazines can opt for the Weekly Package, which stores 12 flatplans at a time. This package costs $55/month.
Why online? Why not software I can download onto my computer?
There are many advantages to an online system
- You automatically benefit from any fixes, or upgrades, without having to buy or download a new version.
- When you need to send your flatplan out to, for example, the sales team for approval or the art department for action, you can do this by sending out a single web link for them to follow.
- You save hard-drive space – especially if you have been using a design program to paginate. Those documents are very large and can eat up server space. With an online system, Blinkplan takes care of storage space. If you want to keep copies on your hard drive, these can be downloaded as PDFs, which are small files.
- Using your username and password, you can access your Blinkplan from any internet-connected computer in the world.