Art Design Tip: Give Us Everything!

By Ophelia Sayson

There are days when life in a production environment is smooth sailing and other times when you’re ready to throw in the towel. It happens usually on those days when you’re already multi-tasking to the hilt to get those oh-so-important deadlines met, when you run into minor yet debilitating snafus, and you’re ready to scream “why me???” but just CHILL….. take a deep breath… you can get through it.

So here’s a tip to ensure the smooth output of anything you submit to any production department. GIVE THEM EVERYTHING — specifically, what’s called the native files. That encompasses all the associated image and art links, and all the fonts that make up your beautiful, award winning design. Yes, its true that sometimes there are workarounds for incomplete source files, but which would you prefer? – to pay for two hours trying to make your piece work or to spend 30 minutes on your piece and with fewer clicks of a button…  I’m going to assume that cheaper would be preferable.

Here’s what you need to do so that it costs less to get your piece up live with the minimum amount of fuss. Some programs call it “Package…” some call it “Collect for Output”. Packaging or collecting for output is usually located under the “File” menu. This is a great tool which every graphic designer should be using to ensure that people who work in art production will live to see all their hair follicles in place til the onset of old age. Kidding aside, it literally takes only a few clicks and your program will collect all important files associated with your design and drop it into one folder.

As added insurance, its a good idea to include in this folder a PDF of your design so that the production department has an exact representation of your design. You may ask why this is necessary when they have the native files to look at? The reason is that different computer platforms handle fonts differently. Some fonts get garbled in the translation between different platforms, so having a PDF of your design to compare to is your insurance that your design has all its t’s crossed, and all its i’s dotted, in all the right places.  AND you’ll  have a very happy and contented production partner.

Art Design Tip: Give Us Everything!