Nothing brings a piece of marketing down more than having a mistake in it. As soon as I see a misspelled word or grammatical mistake I find my attention suddenly drifting away from whatever advertisement I’m reading.
When I’m reading a novel I find myself more forgiving of such things. Given the length of a novel some mistakes can get overlooked, but most advertisements are much shorter than that, and so if a mistake exists it’s because someone wasn’t really proofing everything.
Brochure printing is the most likely to contain mistakes like this because when compared to other forms of advertising it has a lot more words to go wrong.
However, I don’t want people to think I’m only talking about mistakes with the writing, because often mistakes can extend beyond just that, even if the general public isn’t quite as aware of it.
With this I’m talking about different mistakes with the images because it was printed on the wrong type of paper, or because the image looked different on a computer screen than it did when actually printed out.
Often a mistake like this has no impact on the general public because they never end up seeing it. Instead a company has to foot the bill for getting more printing done to correct the mistake, and that can end up costing you quite a bit.
I think brochure printing makes a good example for this because you have so much more that can go wrong than when you’re getting postcards done, or something like that. A brochure has many elements, and when you have to keep track of that many things, sometimes stuff has a way of messing up.
But what can you really do to stop things like this? The first is by being aware that it can go wrong.
Take for instance the idea of colors looking different on the screen than when you print them. I think many people never realize this until they make the mistake, at which point it’s too late to change. But if you research what all goes into the process of making brochures you’ll be aware of the risks that come with having them printed, and you won’t get your printing done before you know the colors are just right.
As for the spelling mistakes, all that takes is having another person set to go over all of the details of the project before anything else goes forward. This is a good system to prevent a number of mistakes by always having additional eyes paying attention to what you’re doing and heading off potential mistakes right away.
Some mistakes will find their way into your work no matter what you do, but the more people you have working on it and the more safe guards you have in place, the smaller the odds of that happening.
