Visit to RR Donnelley

Today, I visited RR Donnelley. RR Donnelley, is a company based around the globe that specialises in all things corporate. I managed to visit them through the use of my dad's contacts with his business. They are producing the annual reports for my dad's company. I wanted to go along because i wanted to see what corporate design was really like, and how the whole system functions. Throughout the day i managed to sit it on a client meeting, to see how they handled their clients and then i managed to go and meet up with their in-house creative team. RR Donelley outsources a lot of it's design work because mostly they are a typesetting company, focusing more on the information layout as opposed to the look. However, they have created an in-house design team to now take over from the outsourcing.

I met Terry O'shea who is the 'Composition manager - Typesetting' for the London Branch. He was a brilliant guy, who talked me through all their processes and was really helpful and insightful. They focus on doing a lot of bulk printing, and sending things out to a wide variety of countries and all of this has to be 'owed' by Terry. His job is immense. One of the main parts of his job is to sit with the clients and a designer, and go through the production of the work for the client. They then proceed to creating speck pages for the client and then the whole project runs on from there. 

Within the companies across the globe they use a unique set of software that works across the whole network so that at anyone time there is ALWAYS someone working. This means that huge jobs that need to be turned around in 1 night can be handed off to other countries, say in japan, if they need more help. They also break the projects down into specific areas so that different employees can work on different things. There is also a constant flow of communication which makes jobs move faster and ore efficiently. The typesetters within the UK office work on 3 shifts, over a 24 hour period. The shifts are broken down as such: 7am - 3pm, 3pm - 11 pm, 11pm - 7pm.

Learning about the processes within RR Donnelley was fascinating. I never thought about design on such a grand scale, at first it was quite hard to get my head around but after Terry took me through it and actually showed me the work that is done and the areas it's done with i managed to get a grasp. After going to this visit, I'm not sure working on a scale this big is really for me, i found it a littler overwhelming. However the level of control and organisation really helps the projects run smoothly and the work produced is fascinating. I intend to keep in contact with Terry and the design team because their wealth of knowledge and experience is like nothing else. They were such a friendly team, and I can see why people really enjoy working there.