July 22, 2009
Catalog: complete.
the post-revision round 3 "minor changes" effected 25 of the 64 pages
The catalog that has been owning me for the past month is complete. Mechanicals made and uploaded to the press at 11:20, our deadline was noon. Although the client was seemingly trying very hard to get that to not happen. Not only did we get one day to make any “final tweaks” they had to the document, which included a 2nd redesign of an entire section, we got a redesign of a spread at 5 o’clock yesterday.
this is a 64 page catalog that I had 5 days to initially roll out. 3 days for R1 revisions, 2 days for R2 & 3 and basically half a day for the final revisions. Did i mention that the client gave us pages 1-3 days late for every round? A few times opting to send us very low res scans, that we couldn’t even read, at the end of the day the revisions were due, which was useless and we’d have to wait for the next day shipment anyway.
Why can’t more clients just mark up pdfs? It’s so much less hassle. If you’re working in marketing, you should have Acrobat pro and know how to place comments. You shouldn’t be:
- Faxing over changes (This is especially fun when they reference colors you can’t see.)
- Scanning and emailing low res images with changes written on them
- Sending changes in a Word doc, especially if it’s a multiple page document and your changes don’t reference anything other than the sentence that needs to be changed. We designers love a good scavenger hunt! And by “love” I mean “will punch you in the neck for sending us on”.
- Mocking up the design you want in Excel (Seriously. Excel.)
- And under no circumstances, should you be embedding low res images in Word/Excel documents and be expecting a designer to pull these images out and convert them to suitable print res files with our design alchemy.
Read more from the Designing category. If you would like to leave a comment, click here: Comment. or stay up to date with this post via RSS