How To
Price a big run in minutes, not an hour
Quoting signs and wide-format prints by the square foot in Illustrator, without a calculator.
One of the biggest time sucks in my day is pricing. For every item I open the file, grab a calculator, punch in the width and height, round up to the next square inch or square foot, add the copies, and multiply by my rate. One or two pieces is nothing. A full run of posters or signs can easily eat an hour, and the whole time I am just a person transcribing numbers.
The slow way, and where it bites
Pen, paper, and a calculator. It works right up until it doesn't. Fat-finger one measurement and the total comes out wrong, usually with nothing to tell you it is wrong. Lose your place in a stack of files and you skip a piece entirely, which you find out later when the invoice doesn't match the job. Every number you punch is another chance to start the whole thing over.
The fast way: let the artwork do the math
Instead of measuring each piece, I let the vectors report their own size. The Area Price Calculator that ships with FlightDeck reads the true area of whatever you select, straight off the artwork, so the only thing you type is your rate.
- Open a new Illustrator document.
- Drag in all the files you are quoting.
- Select every piece that shares the same material and price.
- Go to File > Scripts and run Area Price Calculator.
- Choose Square Feet, Use Exact Area, and round up to the next full square foot.
- Enter your price per square foot.
- Read the total. No calculator.
- Have it drop a price tag onto each item, so the number lives right on the artwork.
That is the whole thing. Select, run, read. No transcribing, no rounding by hand, no second-guessing a number you punched three files ago. And here is the part I like most: it can drop a price tag onto every piece as it goes, so the number lives right on the artwork, and nothing gets quoted twice or missed.
Shop tip
Group by rate. Select only the pieces that share a material and price, run the calc, and note that total. Then select the next group and run it again. One clean subtotal per rate, and nothing gets double-counted.
Why this one is a favorite
This is one of the best things to come out of FlightDeck for me. A quote that used to cost an hour now takes a couple of minutes, and that hour goes back into prepping files or, honestly, taking a break. It also means the number I hand a client is the number the artwork actually is, not the number I hoped I typed correctly.