About Me

My name is DJ Dunkerley and I have been in the print business pretty much since I graduated with a bachelor of journalism from Carleton University in 1990. My first pre-press job had me working the graveyard shift with an exactor blade, hot wax, and real estate advertising copy. You might as well say that was about the same time as when dinosaurs walked the earth.

The nineties were interesting times. Computers came into the shop and jobs were open to anybody with an appearance of intelligence and a dash of youthful enthusiasm (i.e. willing to work cheap). I worked for about three different service bureaus/print shop before being hired as an applications specialist by Creo in 1990, by the software development group.

It was the career equivalent of hitting a goldmine. Creo was about ready to burst onto the international prepress scene, and the software group was the hottest place in the coolest company on the Canadian west coast. I joined the team that had been started and run by Dave Kauffman and Judi Hess. I was the tester for Dave Hylands, the first principal software engineer of Creo and the chief developer behind Creo’s first generation workflow system (Platemaster/Overture/Allegro). After a year of working on Prescript 2.0, I switched over to a virtually unknown development team working on PDF based workflow that was codenamed “Araxi.”

That same year, Heidelberg and Creo merged their development teams and Araxi came to be called Prinergy. The Prinergy team had a little-known project manager running things, a guy called Stan Coleman who later became VP of the whole software development group. Still the best boss I ever worked for, doubt I will ever work for someone smarter and tougher than him.

After a stint at running the beta roll-out of Prinergy in Europe, they decided to let me run a small office dedicated to connecting Prinergy to any third-party printer/proofer I could lay my hands on. Professionally speaking, that was the most interesting and fun year of my career.

Early 2001 Creo merged with Scitex and I took up an offer to visit Creo Australia and help with the roll-out of Prinergy 2.0 there. Creo was like in that in those days, one fantastic opportunity after another to work on your personal development and take on challenging roles.

When I returned from Australia they kicked me upstairs and made me a project manager. I worked briefly with the Iris inkjet division in Billerica, Boston before the Epson juggernaut made them redundant, then I worked with the Israelis in Herzlia. The engineers and the software developers, the guys that I worked with, were all right, more than allright, they were really good guys. I had a couple of good years working with them where we got projects out the door that were successful commercially and well-received.

In my last year at Creo I had a brain fart and transferred out of Stan’s division. Words of advice: If you ever up working for a good, smart boss try to keep working under him or her for as long as you can, possibly your damn entire career if you can manage it..

After a year of working in a different division and butting heads with a few senior guys whose first name did not start with S, I was offered a severance package and left Creo a few months before it was bought out by Kodak. The writing was on the wall for us product development guys anyways.

Since leaving Creo in 2004, I have worked for myself at Blue Butterfly Consulting (www.bluebutterfly.ca), landing contracts from the local businesses around town. For sure there is lots I miss about Creo but not the travel: I still remember the time I came back from a business trip and my first son, two years old the time, dragged my carry-on suitcase all through house, stopping occasionally to kick and hit it with various toys.

In the last few years I have acted as a system admin for Printcraft; updated a business continuity plan for a local insurance company; did a business analysis report on an internal print shop; did requirement-gathering for VANOC 2010 Olympic web site and a bunch of smaller projects. In a small market like Vancouver there’s not enough business to be a specialist, so you end up being a jack-of-all trades.

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