Lesson: simplify proofing design artwork. Share it early, make people accountable, and use online proofing / collaboration software.
Typical scenario when proofing design artwork:
- Your marketing campaign will hit print media in 10 days.
- The ad agency emails the artwork in JPG format (after 3 days)
- In-house Marketing Communications team (Marcomms) hands over the responsibility of proofing to the product owners. Deadline was yesterday.
- Product owners print out the JPG and scribble comments on it. Some of them decide to email their feedback. Many typos (another 3 days)
- Marcomms spends a day to consolidate feedback (1 day)
- The ad agency tries to make sense of all the comments (1 day)
- Agency reworks the design. More last minute changes (2 days)
- Sign-off delayed
Chances are you are wasting lots of time today.
Try simplifying it this way:
- Make the agency / Marcomms accountable for all typos and typographic stuff (spelling errors, grammar, bullets, indentation, etc)
- Work with cut-off dates and make everyone aware of this. e.g. we need to finish this by Thursday in order to do X,Y,Z. Every extra day will delay the project by one day
- Give the product owners clear instructions on providing feedback. Simplify the way you consolidate this. Some businesses may work better with hard copies, others may prefer email
- Simplify the second round by getting the relevant stakeholders in one room. Discuss, debate and fix it immediately
Better still, move towards online proofing. Make use of web-based software to speed up design collaboration and get projects approved faster.
Try ProofHQ. It saves you time in collecting feedback by having one single central proof for all reviewers to mark-up and comment. (Read review by Techcrunch)
How do you proof design artwork in your business?
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