Board question regarding non-software goods.

[Máirín Duffy]

On Thu, 2012-02-23 at 13:52 +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> Such as? I doubt that anybody but the design team has produced designs
> for our swag and I wonder if something that was produced by the design
> team needs an explicit approval from the very same team.

As an example, there are very old, very outdated freedom / infinity /
voice poster designs that I *still* see in event photos, replete with
embarrassingly incorrect fonts.

There have been various T-shirts and posters produced that I never saw
discussed on the design-team list. The FUDcon Milan event collateral
comes to mind here.

There have been keychains and stickers produced that I never saw
discussed on the design team list or brought up to the design team that,
for instance, have the blue colors of the Fedora logo reversed.

Even if someone on the design team does a mock up for you, that does not
mean it is ready to be sent to a printer and it will turn out right.
(case in point, the I |f) Fedora shirts. I did a mockup for them.
Someone - I haven't the faintest idea who - took the mockup and had it
printed. Without consulting design team or flattening the fonts to
paths. The shirts could have looked really cool but instead they have
entirely the wrong font and look a bit off. 

Someone on the design team who knows what they are doing needs to look
at or produce print-ready artwork before it is sent to the printers to
make sure these kinds of mistakes happen. Before spending X amount of $
where X is pretty large, double-check with someone on the design team to
make sure the design is still current. Mockups, even if they are in SVG
(especially if they are in SVG, because they cannot be in CMYK if they
are SVG) are not print-ready.

> Incorrect colors are a problem indeed. We are facing it nearly every we
> produce something, because most companies accept neither RGB nor CMYK
> but want Pantone. Is there anything we can do about this?

I don't know which printers you are talking to who claim they can only
accept Pantone spot colors, but if a printer offers Pantone spot colors,
they will most certainly be able to cope with CMYK. Pantone is
expensive, and is only possible with designs that have a minimum number
of colors (we're talking, 1-5 colors) where you explicitly specify
Pantone ink numbers per area of color. The only designs we would ever
produce with Pantone spot colors (which we'd better prefer not to use
seeing how proprietary Pantone is) are for designs that have two colors:
Fedora Blue & Fedora Dark Blue. The Pantone numbers for these colors are
in the logo usage guidelines and you can give the color numbers to the
printers verbally and they should be able to handle them.

Sometimes a design is produced in CMYK, btw, and something about it is
modified - maybe the copyright year? Maybe a URL? Maybe the version
number? But when it is saved out, it isn't saved as CMYK. So a
previously color-correct and approved design is switched over to RGB.
This has happened multiple times with our media art.

> > and the wrong usage of fonts (usually due to
> > not flattening fonts to paths) in the final product. For the most part,
> > logo manipulations do go through either the logo queue or the Design
> > team, but I have been disappointed in the past by designs with errors
> > that could have been prevented.
> 
> Again, I am not aware of any swag design that did not come from the
> design team. Maybe some new team members need better knowledge of the
> guidelines or we need a more formal approval process there?

Maybe we need a more formal approval process. But there are definitely
items getting produced that haven't been brought up to the design team
at all so it is a problem. 

I mean, in the end, maybe it's not a big deal, but I feel very, very
badly about the amount of money spent on purple Fedora things and things
where the font is so obviously wrong - but as a designer I'm likely a
lot more sensitive to these things than your average bear. That being
said, I do think Fedora is worth getting these things right and they do
add up over time to create an unnecessary unpolished / sloppy
impression.

I would be happy to put together a guide of 'things to check for before
sending a design to printing' for anybody who is interested, maybe do a
quick screencast or something? Does that sound helpful? Would people
actually be willing to take a look and follow the pointers? Are there
any specific questions you have about how print stuff works or why such
and such accident happened and how to prevent it that I can make sure to
cover?

~m