What actually goes into a design review before you ship it
I have spent years going through artwork with a fine-tooth comb, and the process is less about creativity and more about not missing the small things that make clients angry later. A checklist is not some inspirational poster. It is a mechanical tool that catches errors before they cost you money. The Essential Guide For Graphic Design Checklist approach is what separates people who get revisions from people who get invoices. Start with the file itself. Naming conventions matter more than people admit. If you are working with a team or handing off to a printer, a file named brochure_final_v3_new.pdf is a liability. Go with something structured like ClientProject_Type_Version_Date.psd. It takes three extra seconds per file and saves an entire afternoon of hunting. I once spent forty minutes looking for a source file that was saved as untitled.psd in a folder labeled old stuff. The client wanted changes to a campaign from two years ago. That did not end well. Resolution is the next thing. Screen work runs at 72 to 96 DPI in most cases. Print needs 300 DPI minimum at the actual output size. Not upscaled. Actual output size. I found this out the hard way on a business card job where the original design was created at 72 DPI and then scaled up. The edges were soft enough to pass casual inspection on a monitor but looked terrible when a client zoomed in on the physical proof. We had to redo the entire type layout for legibility at that low resolution. Took a half day. Cheap lesson.
Color modes need to be checked before anything else if print is involved. RGB on screen becomes unpredictable in CMYK. The shift is usually small but noticeable in saturated blues and bright greens. I always convert to CMYK and check the proof in Acrobat or Illustrator's soft-proof mode before sending to print. The difference between your screen blue and the printed blue can be the reason a brand color looks wrong. It has happened to me twice in the last five years, and both times the client was unhappy until we went back and corrected it. Typography is where most junior designers mess up. Kerning, tracking, line height, and font embedding. If you are sending a PDF to a printer, fonts must be embedded. Missing font warnings in export dialogs should never be ignored. I use the Save As workflow in Illustrator with PDF/X-1a or PDF/X-4 depending on the printer's requirements. Most modern printers accept PDF/X-4 because it handles transparency better. An older printer might force PDF/X-1a, which flattens everything and removes transparency. Call them. Ask what they want. Do not guess. Bleed is another common failure point. Standard bleed is 0.125 inches on each side for most commercial printing. If your background color or image extends exactly to the trim edge without bleed, you will get white slivers after cutting. This happens constantly. I set my document up with bleed from the start rather than trying to fix it later. That means creating the canvas with the bleed area included and pushing background elements past the trim line.
Here is something people do not expect. Image links in Illustrator and InDesign can break when you move a folder. If you send a package to a client or another designer, use Package in InDesign or Collect External Files in Illustrator. This copies every linked image, font, and referenced file into one folder. I learned to do this after a client sent me a project folder that had all the images grayed out with red X marks. The original files were on a different machine that was no longer connected. It took two days to trace down every asset manually. After that, I never trusted a folder without running the collect script first. Export settings vary by destination. Social media images go out at sRGB color profile. Web files should be optimized. Photoshop's Save for Web or the newer export options let you compress without visible quality loss. A JPEG at 80 percent quality often looks identical to the original but is a fraction of the file size. For SVGs, strip unnecessary metadata and simplify paths where possible. A clean SVG can be 90 percent smaller than a raw export from Illustrator. Print proofs require a different mindset. Always request a physical proof for color-critical work. Digital proofs on your calibrated monitor are useful but not definitive. Paper stock, ink type, and press conditions all affect the final result. A proof on coated stock will look different than the same file on uncoated. Coated stock makes colors pop more. Uncoated absorbs ink and mutes saturation slightly. I keep a reference sheet of common paper stocks and how they shift colors. It took about six months to build but now it saves me from guessing.
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File organization during the project matters too. Keep layers labeled and grouped. A flat PSD with fifty unnamed layers is a nightmare for anyone who touches it after you. Use folder structures like 01_Comps, 02_Final, 03_Assets. It is slightly more upfront work but the time you save in the handoff phase is worth it. I used to skip this step and regret it every single time. Not anymore. One counter-intuitive point about checklists. They are not meant to limit creativity. They are meant to remove the mental load of remembering every technical detail so you can focus on the design itself. When everything is systematized, you spend less energy worrying about whether you forgot something and more on making the work good. That is the real purpose. The downside is that checklists can become rigid if you treat them like gospel. There are edge cases where every rule breaks. Custom die-cut packaging, for example, does not follow standard bleed or CMYK assumptions. Specialty inks, spot colors, embossing, foil stamping, and other production methods require specific handling that no generic checklist covers. In those cases, you need to talk to the printer or production house early. The checklist gets you to ninety percent. The conversation gets you to the last ten.
Another limitation is that checklists assume you have time to run through them. Tight deadlines squeeze out review steps. I have worked on jobs where the turnaround was six hours and the checklist had to be condensed to the essentials. In those situations, I skip the full package and focus on the three things that would cause the biggest problem: resolution, color mode, and bleed. That is a triage approach, not a complete one. It works for speed but not for quality-critical work. If you want a downloadable version of this checklist, most design resources and template sites offer printable PDF versions. Search for graphic design prepress checklist or design deliverables checklist and you will find several free options. I prefer to keep my own version customized to my workflow because every project type has slightly different requirements. What works for a logo design will not work for a full brand identity package. Tailor it. The bottom line is that a good checklist prevents errors, not enables excellence. The design still has to be designed. But making sure your files are correctly prepared, properly exported, and clearly organized is the unglamorous part of this work that keeps you from being the person who sends a wrong file to a client and has to explain why the colors look different on the printed piece than on the screen.
