Having been employed as a graphic designer for over 13 years for fashion brands and leading custom apparel shops, I’ve seen my fair share of artwork. The designs that stand out and were a thrill to produce were usually created by a designer that not only executed the artwork brilliantly but gave careful consideration to the medium and the method. They’re the ones that hand you a beautifully layered Photoshop file or a vector file at the correct size, format, and quality for production – ah, be still my beating heart!
Sadly, for most design folk in the decoration industry, production-ready designs are rarely presented on a silver platter. We often have to chase better files, make the best of what we receive, recreate the unprintable, design the unthinkable, and negotiate multiple changes from vague customers while our production departments hustle us to keep the orders moving. The good news is that the most challenges that frustrate graphic designers in print and embroidery shops can be solved or even avoided altogether with the right tools.
1. Vague Briefs
Ever have a customer who said they would know what they wanted when they saw it or the ‘just come up with something cool, I trust you’ guy? We’ve all seen the type that struggles to articulate what they want until you’ve labored over your design for hours, at which point they’ll tell you it’s precisely what they don’t want! Coaxing a good brief out of non-visual people allows them to refine their concept. Present these customers with a good brief template to get the ball rolling before you invest any manpower. Research and asking solid questions at this stage saves you pain further along in the process.
While pointed questions and forms are useful, providing customers with a tool that lets them explore their ideas themselves can be even better. Using a visual online design tool such as DecoNetwork’s Online Designer, allows the customer to self-serve by creating their own art, building their own templates, and creating accurate mock-ups for their customized product ideas. Of course, you can still offer advice and tips on how to enhance your customers’ designs before going to press, but at least you have a good basis to work from with a clearer idea of what the customer has in mind. Though you know that some ideas can sound good in theory but fail in execution, for many customers, they need to see it to believe it. (Hello, Mister give me a bold font with drop shadows, blends, starbursts, and flames!).
2. Impossible Dreams
No one likes delivering the bad news that their shop can’t decorate using the customer’s chosen method on a product that their heart is set on, or that there’s no way to print or embroider a customer’s art in the way it was envisioned. Help remove the mystery with clearly written guidelines and explanations of the limitations of each decoration method as well as downloadable resources such as PDF design templates.
Alternatively, you can eliminate the need for templates and guidelines with an intuitive tool that detects whether the artwork size, location, decoration method, or fabric type will be suitable for production. For example, if your customer wants an over-sized, full-color photograph printed onto a 100% polyester polo with paneling, an Online Designer like DecoNetwork’s won’t allow the customer to choose unsuitable products, nor will it allow them to mock up prints across panels if the product is set up to omit that option. Pre-configured products from industry-leading suppliers are ready to use in the system, each with pre-set printable areas, front and back views, and decoration method suitability parameters.
3. Font Fiascos
Customers can be blissfully unaware that matching an existing font or guessing a font that they would like is much easier said than done. They are largely oblivious that failing to convert text to outlines can send you on a font seeking mission into a treacherous jungle of websites of variable reliability. When it comes to mocking up a design for what they consider a simple text-based print or embroidery, this can result in a great deal of guesswork, access communication, and eventual frustration for both parties.
Thanks to tools like What the Font or the input of font enthusiasts through online communities like Quora, identifying a font is easier now than ever before. To avoid the hassle of free font finding missions, make it clear on your website and in your communication that all text must be converted to outlines in any submitted art to avoid additional charges.
For customers after a simple text-based design, explain that there are thousands of fonts to choose from and that it can be quite subjective to choose the right one. You can direct them to a site like Dafont to play around with different styles and preview their text, but the legal maze of licensing requirements for free fonts can be difficult to navigate. DecoNetwork eliminates these problems by providing an extensive collection of safe fonts and text effects in both our Template Builder and our Online Designer. Moreover, this isn’t just a print-specific feature; our online designer generates and displays real embroidered text in our embroidery designs!
4. Spelling Trouble
One minor typo can make a major difference to the successful completion of an order, and the cost is magnified according to the size of the run. On one fateful job for a local school’s annual sports day, a print shop I worked for printed hundreds of shirts with the school’s name misspelled. Although the customer had supplied the file and approved a mock-up with the error, they had not zoomed in to view the small pocket print, and we hadn’t indicated in our approval process that they should double check spelling in all areas of the artwork. In the end, we reprinted the shirts and shared the cost, but situations like these are costly and easily avoided.
When sending a proof for approval, ensure that your covering email or the proof itself asks customers to thoroughly check the spelling of any text, Pantone colors, art size, and position as well as the overall look of the design. Encourage them to zoom in on the artwork or provide a full-scale or large enough view so the customer can clearly identify any errors before going to production. In DecoNetwork, misspellings can be avoided by allowing customers to create their own artwork and mock-ups with our Online Designer. Even the most eagle-eyed team member of your shop can miss something, assume the customer’s art is right or not even be aware that an unusual name has a typo. Enabling the customer to type the text themselves and to approve their own artwork directly puts the onus on them to make sure their text is correct and leaves the spelling of any difficult names in the hands of the people most likely to know the spelling well.
5. Chump Change
Most mock-ups are approved with one or two changes, but there are times when getting to an approval is a painfully long and winding road of back-and-forth communication and repeated alteration. When a customer is indecisive or unclear with their instructions, policies limiting ‘free’ alterations can deter them from requesting an unreasonable amount of changes, ensuring that you are adequately compensated for the additional time. Be clear when you present a proof to your customer that you allow up to (insert number here) changes, after which they will be charged $____/hr for your time. You’d be amazed how less inclined a customer is to continually change their mind when they know they’re on the clock!
This is where an Online Designer really shines: The customer can take control not only of creating their own mock-up but also of making minor changes to their design. They can take all the time they need to play with the fonts, positioning, sizing, colors, and more until the result is to their satisfaction. With DecoNetwork Business Hub, you’ll also remove the problems with losing the thread of back-and-forth communications, as all correspondence, including comments and changes, appear in a central location. So any member of your team can quickly familiarize themselves with the artwork status and history at any stage.
6. Chasing Approvals
It’s ironic that the customers most intent on getting shirts by a deadline can be the hardest ones from which to get artwork approvals! An exorbitant amount of time and energy can be spent in identifying orders awaiting approval and contacting delinquent customers. After sending out a mock-up, you could keep orders on track by setting a calendar reminder or through keeping a rolling approval ‘diary’. That said, a production management system that allows filtering by status is much more efficient, in that you can easily view orders awaiting approval on a single overview screen, like the one found in DecoNetwork. Any team member with access can view the status of an order at any time and be greeted with an easy-to-read view of what needs to be done to get the order on track.
7. True Colors
Recoloring an art file or reducing its colors to suit a product’s base color or a decoration process usually requires an experienced graphic designer, software, time, and at times, a little guesswork. It can be a crucial step in securing an order; setting a customer’s expectations about how their artwork will appear when recolored. But unfortunately, this pre-purchase work can steal valuable time from an art team who may already be swamped with design work for paying orders.
Rather than disrupt your workflow or even leave sales staffers waiting on a busy art team, you can provide a tool like the one found in DecoNetwork’s Online Designer, which automatically detects the colors in an uploaded art file and displays a live preview of rough color reductions to help the customer visualize the result.
8. File Fails
Have you ever had to chase a customer for higher resolution artwork, or had to explain why their logo looks great as a pocket print but will pixelate when increased to fill the back of a t-shirt? Have you asked for a vector format and found yourself provided with the requisite .eps file, only to find that the customer has simply saved the same low res file in .eps format? We all have!
As frustratingly obvious as it may be to an experienced graphic designer, most customers are clueless when it comes to file formats and image quality. Enlighten these customers with explanations and instructions of what you require for an optimum result. The good news is that once educated, these customers are likely to take it on board for their future orders, particularly if they can see the difference in savings for art preparation fees. You can provide these guidelines via an email template, a page on your website, a video tutorial, or an easily scanned blog post. Make sure to clearly state not just the specs of the art file you need, but why you need it and what it means to the outcome of the customers’ products and charges.
Our Online Designer helps to avoid the confusion and explanation around artwork file quality by alerting the customer as soon they attempt to upload a file that does not meet your production-ready standards. This is due to the ability to restrict file formats and to warn a customer who uploads or rescales those low-resolution raster files.
9. Managing Mockups
“Show me 5 or 6 versions of the text- mock a few styles on these three color shirts and I’ll pick one. You’re the artist, you know what looks good.” We’ve all been stuck reworking designs on a rainbow of shirts in an attempt to tack down a cantankerous customer who can’t envision anything without a full mock-up of every permutation of their designs on pictures of the products in question. When I think about the countless hours I’ve spent creating mock-ups for DTG, screen printing, and embroidery orders, I can almost hear tiny violins playing a mournful tune. I’ll never get those hours back, but it’s not too late for you. Though you can attempt to reduce this time-wasting by limiting the number of mock-ups you’ll do for free on a given order, forcing the customer to make choices based on simple flat art-only mock-ups before you create the final garment image mock-up, you can dodge the entire painful process by having a fully-featured online designer like the one in DecoNetwork.
With an Online Designer you can free yourself to work on more critical tasks and areas of your business. Your customers won’t need expensive graphics software or expertise to provide you with visual mock-ups of how they would like their artwork printed or embroidered, since it’s all done in the browser, and DecoNetwork’s online designer is built entirely around catalog images, meaning that any design you or your customer creates is mocked up, at the proper size for production, directly on an image of the selected product.
Want to try our Online Designer for yourself? Test it out on our demo site or watch this cool demo video to see it in action.
from DecoNetwork Blog https://www.deconetwork.com/blog/9-pet-peeves-graphic-designer/
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