Why your campaign died at the printer

A campaign is approved on a screen and lives on paper, vinyl, acrylic and light. Everything that goes wrong between those two states was decided weeks earlier by someone who was not thinking about production, and it is almost always recoverable if it is caught before sign-off.

1. Colour is not a hex value

Screens emit light and print reflects it, and a brand colour chosen on a monitor has no defined behaviour on a substrate. Specify to Pantone, then check the specification on the actual materials the brand will appear on, including the illuminated ones, where the same colour behaves differently again because it is being lit from behind.

Doing this once at identity stage costs a day. Discovering it at the fourth store opening costs the four signs.

2. A logo has a minimum size, and someone will go under it

Fine detail disappears. Decide the smallest size at which the full mark may be used, produce a simplified version for below it, and put both in the guidelines. Otherwise a supplier will scale the full mark to fit a pen and the result will be a grey smudge with your name under it.

3. Check the aspect ratios your media actually take

Outdoor sites, digital screens and in-mall placements each have their own proportions, and they are not the proportions a film is shot in by default. Get the list of formats before the shoot, not after, and frame with the crops in mind. Re-cropping a finished film is the most avoidable expense in this business.

4. Assume the person installing it has not read the brief

They have no reason to have read it. Number the parts, ship an assembly drawing, and design so that the wrong orientation does not physically fit. Anything that depends on an installer's judgment will eventually meet an installer with different judgment.

5. Print the opening material in the same run as the fit-out

If the brochures and the signage are produced weeks apart, or by different suppliers, they will not match, and they will be photographed together on the opening night. Same run, same batch, same colour.

The underlying point

None of this is difficult. It is all just decided too late, by a chain of people each of whom assumed someone earlier had handled it. That is a coordination problem before it is a craft problem, which is why we would rather have the presses in the same building as the designers.