Deane Nettles | Advertising & Graphic Design

Basic Print Design Checklist

This is a basic design checklist and does not begin to cover all design projects or all the exceptions to the rules.

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? When looking at your design, is it obvious that it's the most important part of your design? If not, how could you make it seem more important?

Design Details

• Elements
• If your photos, color blocks or other elements extend to the edge of your page, are you including .125" bleed so they trim off correctly? (In InDesign and Illustrator, go to File ⟩ Document Setup to set this.)
• Did you set up an appropriate margin and/or grid when you created the document? (In InDesign, they are set up in Layout ⟩ Margins and Columns or Create Guides.) Grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_(graphic_design)
• Is your text boxes, photo edges, logos and any other design elements fitted within the margins or to the grid? (Margins on business cards 1 pica; margins on 4"x5" or larger 2 picas; margin for letter-size or larger 3 picas.)
• Do your elements line up with each other?
• Are you leaving space between each of your elements, particularly type and photos/illustrations or type and the edge of a color block? Don't let them crash into each other. The more space, the more elegant.
• 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 your gutters (space between columns). A grid can help with this (see above).
• Are you defining a limited pallet of colors and sticking to it? (Look at Coolers or Adobe Color.) Or are you using the Color Theme Tool in InDesign to pick colors from images you are using?
• Fonts
• Is there enough contrast between all text and its background that it reads easily?
• Are you using no more than 3 font families, and that each are distinctly different?
• 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 in the Paragraph pallet 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 any subhead?
• Are you using Paragraph Styles rather than styling each paragraph individually to keep your type consistent?
• Are you using information heirarchy (font size, weight and position) to guide your reader into and through the copy?
• Does the baseline of the text in all columns line up from column to column across the alleys and gutters? (Including captions and other text 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?