Customer Digital Proofing

[qprint]

I have looked for a post that might answer my question but haven't been able to find one. So please point me in the right direction if there is already a discussion about this.

I'm sure we are not the only shop dealing with more and more customers, general public with no design experience, submitting files for us to print. We are getting files requested to be printed at 7x5 designed as 12.432x28.368 with no bleed, and text right up to the edge. Okay, this isn't an exact scenario, but hopefully it gets my point across. I'm wondering what everyone is doing for proofing to their customers. We are wasting so much time going back and forth with our customers trying to explain why their portrait artwork won't fit in a landscape space, that it will have a white border because there's no bleed, and that their text is going to get cut into if we try to force a bleed. And NONE of them understand it unless we custom make a temple, drawing lines to illustrate all of that.

We do a lot of business over email, so ideally I'd love a way to send them a response that shows how their artwork fits into the requested size, illustrating the bleed and safe zone. But also, if they choose to accept the proof, prompts them to check that they've checked all spelling, phone numbers, etc. and are willing to send the job to print as is, accepting that any errors are theirs.

I'm hoping there is something out there I haven't found that makes all of this quick and easy to show them the problem so that they can fix it on their end or be willing to accept a fee for us to fix it on our end.

 

[printstartup7]

This feels like an ideal task for an AI application within the next 1-5 years.

I bet some of the big trade printers are paying for custom AI applications to do this now. No idea if the price tag would be more like $20,000 or $100,000!

Let me know if you find something that can do this.

 

[jwheeler]

I'm sure we are not the only shop dealing with more and more customers, general public with no design experience, submitting files for us to print. We are getting files requested to be printed at 7x5 designed as 12.432x28.368 with no bleed, and text right up to the edge. Okay, this isn't an exact scenario, but hopefully it gets my point across. I'm wondering what everyone is doing for proofing to their customers. We are wasting so much time going back and forth with our customers trying to explain why their portrait artwork won't fit in a landscape space, that it will have a white border because there's no bleed, and that their text is going to get cut into if we try to force a bleed. And NONE of them understand it unless we custom make a temple, drawing lines to illustrate all of that.

This is not a new problem. Amateur designers were creating messed up files in Word and PowerPoint long before tools like Canva came along. It has always been a struggle to explain margins, bleeds, and scaling proportions to them.

It depends on the customer and how bad the file is...sometimes you spend more time explaining to the customer, going back-and-forth with them, than just fixing it yourself. However, if you know they are going to be a regular/repeat customer, it's to your benefit to explain to them how to prepare proper files. For those cases, it's best to email them a PDF with a simple guide that shows margins/safe zone, and bleeds. Then call them and explain it over the phone (an email explanation rarely works). It's also advisable to guide them on selecting the 'high quality' or 'press quality' PDF settings if their software allows for that. And remember, you don't need to teach them how to make a 'beautiful' design, just a printable file!

As for covering the labor cost of this, we had a $15 file preparation fee at a previous shop I worked at. You can use that as a way to get their attention: "Sir, your file is not setup properly for printing because it is not the right size (and/or has text too close to the edges that may get cut off, there is no bleeds, etc)...would you like to us to fix it for a $15 fee or would you like to submit a corrected file that follows the guidelines on our website on the file submission page?"....and of course, that means you should have a very simple guide that shows margins/bleeds on your website.