Working w/Designers
Animation Examples
Class Info
Color Management
Design Books
Design Career
Fonts — Print
Fonts — Web
Gaming Career
Harddrives
InDesign Preferences
Links for Designers
Links for Web Designers
PDF Types
Portfolios
Production Basics
Design Checklist
Production Checklist
PDF Checklist
Deane Nettles | Advertising & Graphic Design
Web
Advertising
Corporate Identity
Design
Publications
Illustration
Photography
Training
Student Work
Basic Print Design Checklist
Design
Are your copy, your images, your fonts and your overall design a good match for your subject matter? (What are you trying to accomplish with this piece?)
What do you think is the most important part (headline, pull quote, image, idea) of the layout? Is it obvious you think it's important in your design? Do you want to make design changes to make it seem more important?
Design Details
Elements
Is your text boxes, photo edges, logos and any other design elements fitted to the grid?
Do your elements line up with each other?
Are you leaving space between each of your elements, particularly type and photos/illustrations? Or are they crashing into each other?
Are you spacing elements consistently? (Leaving a consistent amount of white space around photos, a consistent space around the text inside a box, etc.) A good unit of space is the width or half the width of the gutter.
Are you defining a limited pallet of colors and sticking to it? Are you using the Color Theme Tool to pick colors or colors from images you are using (look at
Coolers
or
Adobe Color
, for instance)?
If your elements extend to the edge of your page, are you including a bleed so they trim off correctly?
Fonts
Are you using 2 font families or less?
Is your body copy 10pt or smaller for print design? (9pt or smaller for business cards, 12pt for pdfs to be read on a computer screen, 16pt for websites?)
Are you using fonts consistently? (All body copy the same font family, size, leading, and weight, subheads a consistent font family, size, color and weight, captions a consistent font family, size, color and weight, etc.)
Are you using First Line Indent to indent each of your paragraphs consistently?(More accurate and consistent than typing in spaces or tabs.)
Did you remove the First Line Indent from the first paragraph of the story, and from the first paragraph after a subhead?
Are you using paragraph styles rather than styling text individually to keep type consistent?
Are you using information heirarchy (font size, weight and position) to guide your reader into the copy?
Does the baseline of the text in all columns line up from column to column across the alleys and gutters?
(Including captions if possible.)
(Magazine Project)
Did you include:
Headline
Subheads (after the headline to further explain it and/or in the text to break it up)
Text type
At least 3 illustrations or photos
Captions for those illustrations or photos that explain what they are
Credits included in captions (who took the photos, created the illustrations or wrote the copy, and where you got it from)
Have you checked everything on the
Print Production Checklist
?
Reset