Blinkplan | Blog

Since its launch two weeks ago, Blinkplan’s fast, inexpensive flatplan program has seen an enormous response, with signups throughout South Africa, Europe and Asia. It’s had a great deal of positive feedback, most along the following lines:

“You’ve certainly nailed a basic industry need that was surprisingly hard to find on the web. Building these things in Excel or Word is not impossible, but not nearly as simple as you make it.”

 

Here is a summary of Blinkplan’s main features:

 

Easy, flexible payment options

Blinkplan subscriptions vary in price from $15 to $69 per month. There are no contracts – Blinkplan is run month to month. You can cancel or change your pricing plan any time.

 

Privacy

Your flatplans are 100% confidential as Blinkplan uses SSL security – the same encryption system that banks use.

 

Security

Stored on Blinkplan’s server, your flatplans are safer than if they were on your office file server or your hard drive. Our servers are backed up daily and weekly and are protected against crashes by means of storage at more than one location.

 

Page categories

You can name and colour-code up to 30 different page categories – for example, ‘ad’, ‘editorial’, ‘promotion’, etc. These page categories can also be used for basic production tracking in that you can create colour codes for, for example, ‘sent to print’ or ‘text not in yet’.

 

Automatic totalling

At all times, Blinkplan displays how many pages of each category you have, as well as a grand total.

 

Automatic re-flowing

When you move a spread, the affected spreads re-flow automatically.

 

Fractional-ad accommodation

Blinkplan has a number of templates that allow you to split your page into, for example, quarter blocks, halves or strips. These fractions are accurately and automatically totalled.

 

Spanning

If you’re flatplanning a long story, for example a fashion shoot, Blinkplan allows you to repeat one page up to ten times. You fill in the info once, tell Blinkplan how many times to span it, and it does the rest.

 

Section management

Type in your section sizes and Blinkplan will show you whether you have too few or too many pages. Change your sections and you won’t lose any content – Blinkplan will simply show you whether or not your content fits.

 

Stitch-in calculation

Blinkplan automatically calculates all possible locations for stitch-ins or bind-ins. Once you’ve chosen your position, it adds a graphic clearly illustrating (for printers, repro houses etc) where the stitch-ins should go.

 

Notes

A field for notes allows you to type messages about your flatplan for your team or factory.

 

PDF generation

In one mouse-click, Blinkplan can generate a print-friendly, e-mail friendly PDF of your flatplan. You can store this on your computer and send it out to your colleagues. There is also an option to e-mail flatplans out directly from your Blinkplan web page.

For more information, visit http://www.blinkplan.com.

For regular updates, check out our blog: http://blog.blinkplan.com.