Why your print proof is off
A drawing that looks right but is millimetres out does not earn you a compliment; it earns you a complaint. This is where those millimetres come from.
A proof is not a picture
You know how it usually goes: the customer asks for a proof, the sales desk makes a working drawing, and two days later there is a PDF for an order that does not exist yet. The temptation is to replace that step with something faster — put a logo over a product photo and let the customer look. That is indeed faster, but the result is a picture and not a proof.
The difference comes down to one question: does what is on screen match what the printer or the engraver will do? A proof is only a proof once it matches production at actual size. For that the system has to know which area is available, how large that area is in millimetres, where its centre point sits and which technique goes over it. Miss one of those four and the image is an impression at best — and an impression that is too large produces an argument you cannot win.
Three things have to be fixed
Our PIM holds 426,573 technique rules: per item and per variant which area exists, which technique fits it, which maximum size applies, which position belongs to it and which price hangs off it. That sounds like a detail and it is the heart of the matter. Most product data systems make a free text field out of this, and a free text field cannot calculate anything.
Those rules come about in two ways, and both have their own trap. They are drawn by hand on the product photo, or they are extracted from the supplier's PDF. After that the technique still has to be attached, because an area without a technique says nothing about what fits. Today 14,952 products have been prepared this way for logo visualisation, with 11,501 configurations for areas and positions.
The print area is drawn in millimetres
In Image Editor somebody draws, per item and per variant, the area where a logo may go, and sets the centre points the logo is aligned to. That happens in real millimetres and not in pixels. Without a centre point a logo sits neatly in the middle of the photo instead of in the middle of the bottle, and on a narrow item that is a centimetre out.
Or it is taken from the supplier's PDF
Suppliers often deliver print information as a PDF with a line drawing: the outline of the product with the print areas in it. Usable for a person, unusable for a system. PDF Editor extracts that drawing and calculates the size of the area from the real product dimensions — so from the size of the item and not from the size of the drawing. That is precisely where it goes wrong when somebody does it by hand.
And the technique sets the rules
Screen printing, pad printing, engraving, embroidery, digital and embossing each make their own demands and each have their own volume tiers and set-up costs. An area that is roomy enough for screen printing can be too small for embroidery. As long as the technique is attached to the area, the configurator can include the price straight away; without that link you are left with a price somebody still has to check.
An old PDF in a different format
Here is the error that happens most often and is hardest to see. A line drawing is laid out at a particular page size. Put that drawing in a canvas of a different size later and the proportion shifts with it: the product sits too small or too large in the drawing, while everything else looks correct. The outline is right, the areas are in the right place, and still every millimetre is out.
That is not a theoretical risk. At Spranz a check of the existing items showed that 177 of the 376 products sat too small in the drawing, because the original PDF had a different format from the canvas. That was corrected with a script and is now being checked item by item. We quote that figure here because it shows where the time goes when preparing a catalogue: not in the drawing, but in the checking.
The lesson is simple. Anyone taking over an existing set of items — from a supplier, from an old system or from an agency — also inherits the formats they were once laid out in. You have to go through those once, and then never again. If you do not, you discover it item by item, and always at the moment an order depends on it.
Three complaints with the same cause
When the sizing is wrong you rarely notice it in the proof itself. You notice it in the complaints that follow weeks later, which at first sight have nothing to do with each other. Below are the three we meet most often, with the cause alongside.
“The logo is smaller than on the example”
The classic outcome of a drawing in a mismatched format. On screen the logo filled the area; in production the area turns out to be larger or smaller than assumed. This is the complaint nobody is right about: the drawing was consistent with itself, just not with the product.
“The photo is blue but the product is black”
An image matched at item level instead of variant level. Print areas belong at variant level, and so do the photos, because a blue bottle with a black photo is a complaint you do not want. In the nightly refresh a photo that cannot be matched to any variant therefore ends up on a worklist.
“On engraving the logo looks ragged”
A bitmap logo that was never converted to vector. For screen printing and engraving a bitmap stops being usable as soon as the size changes. That is why an uploaded bitmap logo is vectorised along the way, so it stays sharp at every technique and every size and the printer gets the same file the customer saw.
Check once, then keep it up
In a migration of hundreds or thousands of items the question is never whether it can be done, but where you are. That is why supplier PDFs first land in a queue with us: you look at the line drawing, judge whether it is usable, mark it as done, in progress or rejected, and push the approved drawings through to conversion. Preparation is then not a black hole but a workload with a counter: how much is still waiting, what is finished, which supplier is complete.
After that it is upkeep. Print data comes in on the same night as the items and the prices, so a supplier who changes an area changes it at your end too. What the customer sees on screen is then the same drawing the printer receives — and that is the only definition of a proof that holds up in practice.
What this is about
The drawing the customer sees comes out of Magic Logo; the areas underneath are made with Image Editor or extracted from a supplier PDF with PDF Editor. If you want to know how your own items are doing, send one over with a logo.
Magic Logo — the logo on the product, with a price
The print area, the technique and the price in one image, with the proof as a PDF at actual size.Image Editor — drawing print areas per item
Areas, centre points and layers per SKU and per variant, in millimetres.PDF Editor — the line drawing from the supplier PDF
Convert the drawing, attach the technique and calculate the size from the product dimensions.Ask your question
Send us one item and one logo, and you get the proof back.Send us one item
One item and one logo, and you get the proof back the way your customer would see it: on the right area, at actual size, with the technique alongside.
Got a whole catalogue waiting? Then we start with the count of what there is to do.