For those of you who haven’t heard, the clock is slowly but surely ticking away on our quest to launch our new web-to-print software. With that in mind, I’ve been surfing the web for valuable yet hard-to-find information on ordering ad specialties, posters and other miscellaneous printing projects online. The one thing I kept stumbling on, over and over again, is the absolute, unquestioned importance of accurate proofing when you’re ordering products online.
For those of you who haven’t ordered print products online, there’s a trap that tends to open up and swallow the ambitious planner whole. It’s the trap of only being able to see a small part of your printing project at a time. For example, you can see the cup…and the color of the cup’s paint…and the logo…and the font. You just can’t see them altogether to get a good look at what your finished product is going to look like.
That’s good news for designers looking to make a simple, easy-to-use software that isn’t going to take long to put together and put online, but it’s bad news for anyone working on printing projects like business cards, brochures or posters that may or may not be able to accurately gauge how well all the pieces are going to work together. How many times have you discovered that a black font doesn’t look nearly as good against a magenta background as you thought it would? Or realized that a particular font takes the message too far toward the edge of the product, so you can’t actually read what’s going on?
The point is, proofing the complete product should definitely be a part of your complete printing project. Accept no substitutions!