The Butterfly Effect

It’s the graphic communications version of the Butterfly Effect, also known as the Chaos Theory, which holds that a small change in the manufacture of one component in, say, China, can have a negative impact on the print production of a product in New York.

The Butterfly Effect was coined in 1972 by American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz. Its applicability to graphic communications requires no stretch of the imagination, considering that prepress shops and printers use chemistry, ink, paper, plates, exposure units, software and other components from all over the world.