Pay Attention… Please.

Sometimes a lack of attentiveness can be a minor hiccup, caught by someone else at your company or by a thoughtful designer. In other situations, however, it can be costly, such as when a bad proof reading job forces the reprint of thousands of brochures. Obviously it’s best to just avoid mistakes, all together, both the costly and non-costly sort. In our time working with all sorts of clients in both print and web design, we have run into a few areas in which a lot of people tend to, how shall we say, not give their undivided attention. Here are some easy things to do to avoid these pitfalls.

1. Get a proof and proofread. Please use more than one person to do it. The more you look at something, the less likely you are to catch mistakes. This is a lesson most of us have learned in every English, Composition or Literature class we’ve ever taken, and we feel a little silly even putting it on or list. But, people still fail to do it well sometimes, so it has earned itself a spot at number 1.  

Example: costly. An agency that I worked for before founding Luckynine Design once oversaw a project that had to be printed three times costing both the agency and the client thousands of dollars. The piece, a product catalog, contained two mistakes – one typo on the part of the agency and one mistake in price on the part of the client. There is simply no excuse for not catching either of those errors before the catalog went to print. A few more sets of eyes on the comps and proofs could have saved a lot of time and money.

Example: embarrassing. In a recent web redesign project, we sent out some comps to the client, and in the copy on the home page, the founder’s name was spelled wrong. We were horrified that we would make such a mistake, but upon investigation found that the name was spelled wrong on the live site. We had referred to the site when putting in the copy, and duplicated the mistake in the comp. 

2. Look at what you’re sending. Emails, ad copy, website copy, press releases, and anything else you may release to a third party need to be, well, the right documents. Otherwise you might end up with an ad for one product talking about another or an out of date release or a variety of other confusions. Taking the time to simply read over what you’re sending will save you from wasting time fixing something down the road.

Example: costly.

A client sent over site copy for a new website, which we incorporated into the design and published to their site. This was a fairly complex site, so putting in and formatting the copy took some time. It turned out that the copy the client had sent was incorrect – they had an updated version that should have been used. Unfortunately, they had to pay for the corrections since the switching and again reformatting of a large site is time consuming.

Example: embarrassing.

When working on a site for a professional attempting to gain new clients, we were given testimonials to publish for him. They came already nicely put into pdf format, so all we needed to do was upload them and link to them. However, to enhance the page, we decided to take some quotes from the testimonials and display them with the links. It’s a good thing because it turned out that not all the testimonials were positive. It was as though he had taken all of his client feedback and just sent it over. Some of the feedback was great, but others complained of slow service or poor communication. Of course we didn’t publish the negative feedback, but we could easily of done so had we decided only to link to the files.

3. Review functionality and test. And then have others test for you, too (see item #1). Whether it’s a new product or website, chances are you are too close to it yourself to catch what may be obvious errors in function. The push to rush to production might be intense, but the consequences of hasty testing are much worse.

Example: costly. A few years ago an associate of mine decided to jump into the social networking scene and create a new social networking site for an untapped niche market. It was a good idea with unfortunate execution. A company was hired to develop the site, building from scratch what most likely could have been build with existing content management systems. In the rush to get the site live, testing was minimal, and both parties did very poor review of the specs and functionality of the finished site. In the end, a social networking site was developed that did not have a “friends” feature. One was added, but at much unnecessary cost. Simply slowing down, reviewing functionality and testing as the development progressed could have caught this issue. 

These are just a few examples of the most common mistakes we have found get repeated time and again. Just remember in any project, pay attention. You may be saying something you don’t want others to hear.