Problems with an exhibition stand graphic wall, 8m wide and 3m high, at one of the biggest trade shows of the year. The artwork had already been set up and sent to the printers a week earlier.
Swatching out for colour accuracy.
I found the first one by accident when I was supporting a busy studio and setting up another large format piece to stand in front of the wall. I wanted the colours and repeating pattern to match, so I opened up the wall artwork. The problem was that the colours in the wall panels didn’t match the one colour swatch I had as reference.
Digging further turned up another problem. The artwork had been set up to the default US print profile instead of the European print standard. The prepress operator would have converted the job before running it, and the colours would have drifted further.
I went to find the repeating pattern and discovered one more issue. The pattern was a vector file placed into a layered Photoshop file at a resolution too low for the final size. It didn’t even need to be a raster image at all. Recoloured to the palette, the vector would have printed sharply at any size.
Those files were already with the printers, and a colour mismatch would have been obvious from across the exhibition hall. I alerted the team to warn the printers, then corrected the artwork and resupplied the job, all in the space of an hour.
Who checks the set-up on your large format files before they go to the printers?