A customer sends artwork for a leaflet on a Tuesday afternoon, expecting delivery on Friday.
The file has no bleed, is in the wrong colour space, contains images at screen resolution and has live text too close to the trim edge. None of this is visible to the customer, whose file looks perfect on screen.
Prepress identifies it on Wednesday morning, emails, and the customer replies Thursday. The Friday deadline is gone, and nothing about the press was ever the constraint.
The first failure: customers do not know the requirements exist
Bleed, resolution, colour space, fonts and margins are invisible from the design side. Somebody producing a file in ordinary software has no reason to know any of it.
The second failure: the requirements are published in trade language
A specification written for designers is unreadable to a small business owner who made something themselves, and it is the second group who submit most of the problem files.
The third failure: the file is checked too late
At prepress, after a queue position has been allocated. Checking at the point of upload turns a lost day into an immediate correction.
The fourth failure: bleed is the commonest omission
Anything printing to the edge needs it, almost nobody who has not done this before includes it, and it cannot be invented reliably after the fact.
The fifth failure: resolution is misunderstood
An image that looks sharp on a screen is frequently a quarter of what print needs. This is the second commonest problem and the hardest to explain persuasively.
The sixth failure: the colour space difference is not explained
Screen colour and print colour work differently, and some screen colours simply cannot be printed. Customers experience this as the printer getting it wrong.
The seventh failure: fonts are not embedded
Which produces substituted typefaces and a proof that does not match what was designed, and which is invisible until somebody looks at the output.
The eighth failure: the safe margin is ignored
Text too close to the trim edge gets cut or looks wrong. Customers design to the edge of a page because nothing told them not to.
The ninth failure: the file format is unclear
What is accepted, what is preferred and what causes problems. Customers send whatever their software produces by default.
The tenth failure: the proof is treated as a formality
Approved quickly without proper checking, which is where responsibility shifts, which is the ground in artwork and file questions printers answer daily.
The eleventh failure: the large format requirements differ again
Scale, viewing distance and material change what a file needs, which is the ground in large format and banner questions from local businesses.
The twelfth failure: the deadline was never realistic
Because the customer counted from submission rather than from approval, and nobody explained that the clock starts when a usable file is approved.
The fix: check the file at the moment it is sent
An assistant that explains bleed, resolution, colour and margins in plain language, tells a customer what to check before sending and explains that the timescale starts from approval turns a Wednesday rejection into a Tuesday correction. The technical handover sits in file format and technical handover questions, and the mobile submission side in how to add a chatbot to your mobile site. Start at try, see features, and the sector view sits under printing services.