Yesterday was a one / two punch of failure that has me doubting my ability to split my focus on my day-job and my after-hours art job…
The Christmas card I designed for a client came out a lot darker than expected in the print process. It’s still workable, but it’s not optimal and the client isn’t totally happy.
I’m not sure this one is 100% my fault as VistaPrint is pretty much Diet Print Shop, but it’s still something I should have considered.
The two final designs for the business cards have the font entirely too small for use, which is probably 50% my fault as I mentioned trying to squeeze war and peace onto one side of a card was dicey at best, and the designs were approved by the client…
But this sunk in after 500 cards were printed, so they aren’t happy…
Normally I do test prints of final designs to find these sorts of things, but this time I didn’t. I’m not sure why other than the fact I finished the final, final, final revisions at like 10 pm and was just burnt.
Oh well. Lessons learned I suppose… Nothing, and I mean NOTHING will be PDF’d for print and sent to the client for print until I’ve printed it myself for final proofing.
This means I need to re-ink my expensive printer… Sigh…
In other news I’m off the hook with the icon client — mostly. They’ll have someone else fight with them over the glyph design in a more ‘live’ fashion than I can manage with my process having to be after 5 pm. But as I’ve kind of patented the process of turning the base icon into the 40-ish variations for the application in a speedy fashion, I’ll still be doing that.
It’s the best of both worlds I suppose; someone else gets the design headache and I still get a few hours here and there of extra income.