With more than 20 years of experience designing print projects for Suttle-Straus and our clients, I've seen a lot of projects go "off the rails." Delays are often preventable and introduced in common spots in the life of a project. Here are my top tips to make sure your design projects run smoothly and efficiently:
The best projects start with a complete creative brief, which is a document that lays out what you are looking for. A salesperson or customer experience advisor can help you fill one out prior to submitting the project.
The more details we have, the better:
Sending examples of other work you like and/or don't like can be very helpful in the design process.
Also please share your approximate budget with us. We need to know how much time we have for concepting and design, as well as what you can afford to do with formats, specialty printing effects, mailing, etc. Knowing these details ahead of time helps us to be the most efficient and get you the most bang for your buck. We will always try to save you money, but we don't want to offer something you can't afford.
If you have them, please send us your brand guidelines, vector logo files and fonts for reference. We are an extension of your brand police, so please don't ask us to stray from your established brand or alter your logo unless you're ready to take on a full re-design of your brand.
Sending content that is as close to final as possible is essential. We need to receive all the content prior to starting a project. This helps designers decide the best layout and determine how much space they will need to tell the story.
You should send only high resolution, large image files. Images pulled from Facebook, Google, or other websites are low quality and don't reproduce well in print. We also cannot use any images that you do not own the copyright for.
A variety of images to choose from is appreciated, but we don't need or want your entire image library. If there are certain images you'd like us to use, specify them with actual file names whenever possible, as we may or may not be familiar with references to people, places or events.
If you need us to source images, please be as specific as possible in terms of what you want us to search for. You will be charged for search time as well as purchasing high res images once they're approved for placement. We will only source royalty-free images from approved stock vendors. This should be considered in your budget as some stock images range in cost from $10-$1000+. Anything that needs special rights permission will need to be sourced by you.
Before you submit the creative brief and content, make sure that everyone on your end is "on board" with the project, creative direction, budget, and timeline – your supervisor, the board, or anyone else who needs to be involved.
After design has started, it's best practice to designate one point person on your end. This person will be the main point of contact that filters all pertinent information before sending it to us – i.e. answering questions from your team, compiling and clarifying direction, providing comprehensive edits, etc. This person is responsible for disseminating proofs internally and acquiring edits or approval from all the necessary internal parties (supervisor, board, etc.) before passing direction back to us. Having conflicting direction from multiple parties can be confusing and easily stall a project.
Proofreading is your responsibility - please make sure that design concept files are routed to everyone who needs to see them before giving us the go-ahead. This will help us minimize the number of hours spent making copy edits.
Please compile all edits as a marked up PDF with your comments made inside the file. This helps us keep track of changes between rounds, and also makes it easier to copy and paste back into our design software. If we have to re-flow all of the copy because we don't know what has changed or if we have to combine edits from multiple sources (emails/meetings/word docs/phone calls), it takes longer and there is a greater chance that something will be missed or spelled incorrectly. You can download Adobe Adobe Reader for free to make comments on a PDF proof here: https://get.adobe.com/reader/
You will see final production proofs before anything goes to press as a "last check", but this is not the time to make copy edits or other changes. At this point you should be reviewing the color is accurate and the pagination/folds are correct. Edits to content at this stage should be kept to a minimum if at all possible.
Bottom line: The more details we have from the get-go, and the more buttoned-up your content and edits are delivered, the more efficient we can be. This means we spend less time on your project, and you spend less money. Everyone wins!