Did you know that 50% of drug recalls happen because of errors with artwork on the packaging and labeling? The state is the same for many products across industries.
With hundreds of regulations and artwork to create, many things may slip out of notice. And the cost of that can be quite high. It could result in recalls of batches and quite possibly having to send them back to the production line.
Say your design team finalized the label for your product and sent it for review.
The design team then waits for days to get the review. Often, they receive contradicting suggestions. This then starts a series of back-and-forth emails, and before you know it, the deadline has arrived.
The truth is, the most time-taking part of this entire process isn’t the designing. It’s the days and months spent assimilating all the suggestions and feedback that often lie scattered on various tools and platforms.
Why are emails inefficient for reviewing artwork?
Here are five reasons why emails are no longer effective when it comes to artwork management and designing:
1. No precise feedback
Email suggestions like “Can you enlarge that logo?” or “Can you move the picture to the left a little?” do little to help your design team. They often have to assume what your feedback means. As a result, they might enlarge the logo a lot or move the picture just slightly to the left.
Emails don’t allow you to give precise feedback and thus end up in a lot of re-work and lost time.
2. An absence of organized records
A lot of your internal communication may happen by email. Now, what if your team has to find that one feedback annotation?
And worse yet, what if one such important email was mistakenly deleted? With no proper records, there are bound to be errors and miscommunications.
3. No confidentiality
Packaging and labeling artwork need a lot of confidentiality. What if someone forwards the email to a person outside the team or the organization? And what if you want to assign selective permission to everyone involved in the process? That becomes difficult while working with emails.
4. Difficult to keep track of things
Even if you have your read receipts turned on, it is quite inconvenient to keep track of everything. Accountability also goes for a toss. Who has given their suggestions? Who assigned some specific feedback to a team member, somewhere in an email thread? Without a proper feedback process and platform, the review process could turn out to be quite chaotic.
5. No versioning feature
What if you decide to create version 2 of the label? Will you include it in the same email so that it’s easy to compare? Or would you start a new thread for it? Even if you decide on these variables, wouldn’t it be an annoying process for your team to keep a track of whether the suggestions are flowing in for the previous version or the new version?
The modern way to review artwork
Here are some facets of the modern way of reviewing artwork that solves all the above problems:
1. A centralized feedback process
Information gets siloed when your team is making use of a lot of different tools. Some design comments may be in emails. While feedback related to regulatory guidelines may be on Trello.
As a result, when someone is going through the feedback comments in Trello, he might have to remember, “What annotations did Peter provide in Slack?” Eventually, someone has to take all these siloed pieces of information and make sense of it.
Imagine if your team is making use of 4 tools and there are 3 reviewers, this sums up to 12 silos of information.
That is a whole lot of unnecessary steps for the person assimilating all that feedback. Whereas proofing tools provide a single platform where everyone can share their feedback.
2. An asset library in one place
Suppose you are making different packaging for the upcoming holiday season or a special day like Oreo did for its July Fourth packaging. Instead of starting from scratch, your supervisor asks you to create one using existing design elements.
With an asset library, you can easily find your artwork-related resources, including templates, logos, brand guidelines, and past projects that are stored. Artwork Flow’s digital asset management feature accommodates the needs of various teams and industries easing the collaboration. It provides version control, advanced metadata management, asset categorization, and smart tags where you can easily locate your file.
This helps you with faster approvals, cuts duplication, and quickens production time.
3. Decide on the roles and context of the feedback
When roles are unclear, nobody has a clear idea of what should happen and who should be doing what. Instead, segregate various functions of the packaging design and assign a specific category to each person.
For example, one person would oversee taking action on the design feedback while another on the regulatory compliances.
Similarly, give the context behind feedback every time an artwork goes for a review. Should people be checking the design? Or for compliances?
You might spend time deciding on the roles, context, and order of the review process but this saves a lot of time by minimizing errors and bottlenecks.
4. Set up automated workflows to save time
Imagine a crucial advertising campaign with a tight deadline coming your way. Your designer needs to collaborate with you and your client on this campaign. Instead of spending all your time organizing files, coordinating with teams, sending reminders, and requesting feedback, you can set up a defined workflow and automate this entire process.
By setting up automated workflows, your team can speed up the artwork review process and reduce manual errors.
Artwork Flow’s workflow automation software can tailor to your team’s needs, give real-time notifications, lets you create detailed checklists to stay compliant, and provide pre-built workflow templates to get you started with projects.
It can also improve your team’s efficiency by breaking down complex workflows with easy task visualizers such as Gantt charts and list views, and track project progress using the powerful analytics dashboard.
5. Give precise annotations using digital proofing tools
Instead of emailing “Can you change this color tone to a muted one?” You can share precise annotations on your packaging artwork on online proofing software. Artwork Flow offers various proofing and mark-up tools to make the feedback more detailed resulting in fewer revisions and a faster feedback cycle.
Artwork Flow provides an array of proofing tools to help you kickstart the packaging artwork review process:
- Online spell checker: It flags typos with AI-engine and lets you send out error-free labels.
- Online measurement scale: Measure the size of any element in your artwork.
- Artwork color extractor: Identify and extract the exact color from any creative.
- Artwork font finder: Identify and extract the exact font from any creative.
- Artwork PDF compare: Compare between PDF versions and find out the changes made using 3 compare modes.
There are also mark-up tools that help you share contextual feedback by allowing you to highlight text, leave a pinpoint on a certain design element, attach links for reference, and draw any shape to bring attention to a specific detail.
6. Wield the power of effective collaboration and print proofing
According to a report by Gartner, 88% of organizations encouraged or required employees to work remotely due to the pandemic. This meant that many teams needed to collaborate online for their artwork development process.
An online unified platform in this case helped avoid a lot of miscommunications that could have pushed product launches. How? Because teams could send their review comments, files, and attachments on the platform.
Over and above, the ability of these platforms to collaborate with external agencies and printers to allow print proofing meant that there is no difference between the artwork created and the artwork printed.
7. Automated compliance checks
One can overlook a mistake on their packaging label at any point, landing them in legal trouble and costing hefty fines and brand reputation. To prevent that, it is necessary to stay compliant with brand and regulatory requirements.
Artwork Flow’s smart compliance feature, ComplyAI, can help you solve that part. It lets you create customizable rulebooks, and the AI-engine scans for,
- Typos, wrong colors, and grammatical errors.
- Missing information on allergen and nutrient weightage.
- Missing brand logo or incorrect information (claims and barcodes).
ComplyAI can also review spellings of up to 38 languages and ensure your labels are compliant by aligning them to the regulatory standards set by the FDA. So, say goodbye to the old days when you would sit and manually scan through hundreds of packaging and labeling regulations!
8. Have version control to move smoothly between different versions
What if a team member wants to quickly go through the previous version to see who made what changes and at what time? Instead of resorting to emails and asking people individually, online proofing software allows you to quickly switch between different versions.
You can also revert to an older version if needed and speed up the entire artwork process.
Why a generic project management tool isn’t enough?
You might have a question on your mind right now - “But we already have a project management tool. Can’t we use that for our artwork review process?”
Traditional PM tools aren’t designed keeping in mind the unique challenges labeling industries face. They do not allow you to switch versions, compare various design components, or allow confidentiality. And the most important part - they do not have a detailed checklist process for regulatory compliance.
When the cost of even a single error is too high, it’s critical to invest in software that understands your unique needs, such as a packaging and artwork management platform.
Final verdict
Too often, teams get frustrated using the traditional systems for their artwork review process. When this happens, they usually bail out on the entire process. Instead of going through hundreds of emails, they go directly to the reviewer and ask, “Say, Peter, what changes were you recommending?”
When this happens, too much information goes out of the system and there is no accountability or traceability. This results in errors, miscommunications, and even delayed product launches.
It’s critical to avoid this and welcome the modern way of reviewing artwork and say yes to the power of online proofing software and brand asset management software.
To see the brilliance of the tool for yourself, schedule a demo with us!
