Ever wondered how we make sure that your Annual Review is printed in the gorgeous depth of colour we all wished for right at the beginning of the design process? Welcome to the world of scatter proofs…

Cast your mind right back to the cold winters days, sitting in your office briefing us about how important it is that your brand and identity comes across well…

Well, we were listening, with hands around teacups, trying to keep warm.

Once the designs are signed off, we complete the typesetting and then final proofs are underway. We then start the fun process of scatter proofs.

We take all your images, info graphics, pie charts, tables, the cover and a few text pages and we put them on a sheet of B1 paper… We put the pantones on there in different shades to make sure we pick the strongest one, often giving ourselves two or three shades to choose from.

Then we send it off to the printer with instructions (often along the lines of we need A to stand out really well but B needs to be weaker… and please make sure no one looks too pink!).

Then we sit back and wait…

Once we receive the proof we look over it, decide which tints are working well (5% is fine but 8% is too dark etc), making sure to highlight anything we aren’t happy with.

Then it’s on to artworking the files and getting final sign off… which again my friend is another blog for another day…