Built at the counter of a working print shop.

My dad has run a Minuteman Press in Bellevue, Washington for three decades. Every day, customer files arrive broken — RGB colors that will print muddy, missing fonts, no bleed, logos screenshotted off websites — attached to a work order that says "make it look right, need it Thursday."

Somebody in the shop spends hours making those files printable, then more hours laying them onto press sheets. That somebody has thirty years of skill — and most of their day goes to work that doesn't need it.

Plateroom is that work, automated. You type the job the way you'd write it to a coworker — "44-page saddle-stitch booklet, plate 2-up on 12×18, 0.25 gutter" — and press-ready, imposed, plated files come back in seconds. The judgment calls stay human: anything the engine isn't certain about gets flagged for your operator instead of guessed at.

It was built inside the shop, corrected daily by the prepress veteran it assists. When the shop said the crop marks sat too close to the trim, the engine learned. When the shop said an overprint warning was noise, the engine learned to check the way a person does — by looking. It's still learning.

The name comes from the trade: for a century, the plate room was where every job got prepped before it hit the press — files became plates, mistakes got caught, and the run either succeeded or failed based on what happened in that room. Plateroom is that room, running itself.

— Steven Moazez, founder