Sign Off
The importance of not changing things all the time
If you’re a designer reading this, we’ve all been there. You just saved out version six of a design. You made sure everything was pixel perfect. Your file doesn’t have a single “button copy 25" in it. Everything is nice and tidy. Everything is named. You’re feeling pretty good. It’s all signed off.
Then it happens.
Just one more change. Some copy. Nothing big. Few apostrophes here and there, few commas, few extra words, maybe an image needs replacing. Then suddenly it happens…the text doesn’t line up, you have to remeasure the padding, all the fonts need to be smaller. It changes everything. It takes time. You can’t rush it.
But of course you have to. It has to go live today or the world will stop spinning, hurricanes will savage the earth and everyone will die. Your producer doesn’t care, they want to keep the client happy. Your client doesn’t care, it’s a retainer account. You do whatever needs doing, whenever it needs doing.
I worked in advertising for over ten years, a few good years at some top agencies in London, and this cycle never changed.
Banner time
When I was a Junior Designer I used to work on banners. The process after the concept was signed off was to design a master file in Photoshop laid out in the order of frames and animation.
Frame one would have, for example, a giant elephant riding a unicycle. Frame two would have copy above the elephant saying something about a new car which was powerful but agile (hence the elephant on the unicycle). Frame three would pan up to show the elephant flying though the sky. Frame four would would have copy above the elephant saying something about the car being light and nimble…you get the drift.
Once this was signed off (normally after a few amends, an elephant was a stupid idea, it obviously had to be a bear) you would create an animated version, a master file, in Flash. Once this was signed off you would then resize the banner into a myriad of other sizes and create static gif backups.
My enjoyment of banner design was short lived after I discovered that amends could be made to banners AFTER the master file was signed off.
Sometimes it was one line of copy, sometimes two or three or maybe a whole extra frame of copy. To be updated across all banner formats. That’s only ten files, only three minutes per file per single copy amend, only thirty minutes of my time copying and pasting new words into files.
Other times you needed to change sentences. Of course “It’s so fast and agile you won’t believe how it handles” makes so much more sense when changed to “Fast and agile” (really should have signed off the copy there, oh no wait you did). Let me just open the file, find the layer, change the copy, realise the text is too small, enlarge the text, adjust the text on the other frames to match, move the button closer to the text. That’s a great idea. Let me spend twenty minutes updating a single banner then roll that out across the other ten banners in the campaign and spend three and a half hours updating copy.
All of this for a banner that someone is going to watch for five seconds and wonder why on earth there’s a monkey trying to advertise a car.
What people don’t seem to understand about design is it’s repetitive nature at times. Every designer I know loves solving problems, what copy goes above what frame in a banner is not a design problem. Hence when we have to constantly change small things over and over and over and over again we begin to get frustrated. We make mistakes. We don’t align things. We forget to check the font weights. We have long lunches. Constant change is the enemy of the designer.
Keep it fresh
I was at a design talk by Fantasy Interactive a while ago and someone in the audience asked the speakers how they handle constant amends and changes to work and how this affects designers moral and motivation. They replied that when things start to get into multiple rounds of amends, for a homepage for example, they suggest that the designer on the project goes off and designs the contact page of the site. Clients rarely care about this page and will likely sign it off with minimal amends later on in the projects life cycle. The designer has a new problem to solve. The designer is happy.
This type of thinking and process is essential to maintaining a designers motivation and creativity on a project. If agencies don’t control the client relationship and explain the importance of sign off they will very quickly find themselves looking for new designers and likely new clients.
Client’s have a sixth sense when it comes to noticing typos or misaligned pixels. It’s one of their most enduring and disturbing qualities. They will begin to notice the work suffering, they will likely pick the agency up on it, the designer will have to make more amends to fix the errors that have crept into their work before another round of amends arrives to undo all of their fixing.
All of this can be avoided. With sign off. Brief. Design. Review. Amend. Repeat until sign off. It’s simple, but it’s disturbing how few agencies actually follow this model.
