Technology Services for the Publishing Industry
Jim Birkenseer
Jim Birkenseer has over 40 years of experience in the printing and publishing industry. In 1981, he earned a B.S. degree in Graphic Communications from California Polytechnic State University (“Cal Poly”) in San Luis Obispo, California.
Jim started his career working in traditional (“old fashioned”) prepress in the days when artboards and photographic film were used to created printing plates.
Jim worked through, and survived, the “desktop publishing” craze when typographers and traditional prepress methods were being replaced by Apple Macintosh computers, laser printers, and Adobe's PostScript programming language.
In the ’70s, Jim learned the AppleSoft BASIC programming language and got his first computer—a shiny new Apple ][+. Using his new computer, he wrote a database and bookkeeping program for his family's prepress business in San Francisco.
In 1990, he learned the PostScript programming language in order to make PostScript-based imagesetters do useful things—like minimize film usage in order to make more money! He then wound up learning C, C++, JavaScript, and various other programming languages, enabling him to write software to automate and improve prepress and print workflows.
Immediately prior to co-founding Premedia Systems, Jim worked at Collabria, Inc., where he designed, developed, and implemented software that autonomously formatted and generated high quality business documents based on customer specified layout rules and variable data input.
Peter Truskier
Peter Truskier has over 40 years experience in prepress and printing, and has been working with computer technology in the graphic arts industry for over 30. After attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, he worked as a press operator, stripper, cameraperson, color separator, and scanner operator.
As new technologies began to spread throughout the industry, he went on to become a Technology Director, first at Oakland National Engraving, and then at STAR Graphic Arts Co. In both cases, he was instrumental in the installation and implementation of those companies’ first color electronic page makeup systems.
When STAR was purchased by Applied Graphics Technologies, Peter joined the Foster City AGT plant as Director of Digital Advertising and CTP (computer-to-plate) Technology. In that role, he developed and implemented elegant and efficient copydot scanning and CTP production systems, developing both Macintosh- and Windows-based automation tools.
At all three of these companies, Peter was involved in external workflow consulting as well for clients including Apple Computer, Del Monte Corp., Foote-Cone & Belding, Goodby, Silverstein and Partners, Pacific Southwest Container, Imagine Publications, and West Marine.
Prior to co-founding Premedia Systems, Peter spent two years working in both operations and software engineering at Collabria, Inc., an internet-based application service provider for print suppliers and their enterprise customers.