: What is the best practices/ethics to follow as a graphic designer to avoid silly mistakes? I have been working as graphic designer quite, but I have this issue that I can assure that there

@Cody3331749

I have been doing design work for 10 years. I have developed some best practices that I have found helpful.

Whenever possible avoid typing content yourself. You may have to be that designer that requests that a client resubmits their content to you digitally. This eliminates the possibility of mistyping something or that misreading their handwriting.

This also applies to edits. I ask that all clients use Adobe Reader commenting to mark up my proofs when submitting edits. Again this allows me to copy and paste their edits eliminating the possibility of typing errors. It also allows me to check off their edits as I complete them and prevents me from overlooking something.

I always make clients responsible for checking that their content has correct grammar and spelling. But in my experience anytime something is missed it always comes back on the person who touched it last before it went to print. So I always run a spell check on my file before I send to print. It isn't fool proof but it does force you to glance over the entire document one last time before you sent it to print.

I also like to use Acrobat Pro to check for spot colors on the print file. Spot colors can mess you up when going to print if your printer is using an offset press. So you want to make sure that spot colors are only there unless you intend them to be.

But, as others have already stated you just have to find out what works for you. Create checkpoints in your work flow that force to slow down and check your work.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

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@Gloria351

Develop your own Self Check List, looking for the most common mistakes.

For me, this is my checklist before I send anything for approval:


Everything Spelled right?
Sized Right?
Correct color profile? (CMYK, Pantone, RGB etc. depends on type of job)
Using correct approval template?
Is my company's website on the design?


If everything passes, I send it.

Once approved and I have to output it, I go through a second checklist to make sure no mistakes are there.

Nothing as fun as running a 200 shirt order and realizing after the customer gets them that for some reason the design was on the back when it should have been on the front pocket, all because I wrote "FB" instead of "SLC" in the paperwork.

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@Berumen635

The first line of defense is careful checking of your material for mistakes.

The second line of defense is a second pair of eyes, preferably the clients eyes, I.E. "I just received proof revision #4 back and you've marked it as approved. This means you've checked it for content and accuracy?" In other words have other people check it and be responsible for content. If the other person is the client then they are responsible for content that they've approved.

This mainly has to do with type errors and content mistakes. For "Tidy and Neat" you need to design and build very carefully. Make guides .25 pts and use them to place any and everything. Do not place an object without zooming in all the way and making sure the actual edge just meets your guide. (The apparent "snap to" will lie and let things be misaligned, ime) Make shapes exactly sized and placed, to the pixel.

Use consistent line thickness, colors, type and grid throughout. The tricks will become natural.

Without knowing more about the specific mistakes you missed I can only give advice about careful design in general.

As a last thought, as a somewhat experienced designer, my designs don't always look great at first, and I am capable of making bad designs, but I can achieve successful designs in many fewer iterations than it would take others.

Embrace your mistakes, expect them, just don't let obvious ones go to print.

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@Bethany839

You need to develop a quality control checklist that works for you. I can share some of the tools I use personally, but that is not to say that they are the same tools that work for you.

Do you work with one printer on a regular basis? If so, ask them if they have a checklist for print ready artwork. A list like this might include items like whether you have included a bleed or not, whether your colors have been converted to CMYK (if they want that), etc.

If I am proofreading text, I try to check the text backwards--i.e, start at the last word and work my way back through the sentence. One of the ways that our brains get better at reading is by learning to recognize and process groups of words quickly without having to read each word individually. This is a great skill for improving our reading speed, but can come back to bite you when you are proofreading, because your brain has been trained to overlook doubled words or missing words. Proofing a sentence backwards can help you catch these kinds of errors more effectively.

I will tend to print out the mark-up or list of corrections that I receive from my clients, and then literally use a pen to check off the corrections as I make them. If I have taken notes I will add those to my list of necessary corrections and check those off as well.

Lastly, whenever possible, ask your printer for a print check before they do a print run. This requires that you are located somewhere near your printer. They will run one sample of your document that you can then go to their facility and inspect before they run the complete print run.

If you are not local, you might still be able to request a PDF proof--this is not the ideal way to proof a printed document, but there have been times I have caught mistakes (like missing images, missing bleeds, transparency issues, etc.) and corrected them before the complete project was printed.

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