Artwork control: the file that reaches the printer becomes the product

A dieline is an engineering drawing wearing a design costume

The template supplied by a converter defines cut lines, fold lines, glue areas, safety margins and the zones a machine will grip or seal. Designers unfamiliar with production treat it as a canvas outline and place critical content across a fold, inside a glue flap, too near a trim edge or in an area a label applicator will cover. Obtain the dieline from the actual supplier who will produce the pack rather than a generic template, and have the supplier confirm the completed artwork against it before anything is released. That confirmation step is free and prevents the most costly category of error.

One approved file, and a short list of people who may send it

Artwork chaos follows a predictable pattern: a designer, a marketing contact, an agency and a factory each hold a version, corrections are made to whichever copy someone had open, and the printer receives a file assembled from two different rounds. Prevent it with a single storage location holding the current approved file, a naming convention carrying product, market and revision, and a named individual authorised to release to the supplier. Superseded versions should be moved out of reach rather than left alongside. The failure is administrative, unglamorous and entirely avoidable, and it destroys print runs regularly.

What a screen cannot show you about a printed pack

Colour on a monitor bears little relation to ink on a substrate, and the same file printed by different methods or onto different materials produces visibly different results. Ask for a proof produced on the intended material by the intended process, check it under the lighting the product will be seen in, and verify that any machine-readable code actually scans from the printed sample rather than from the file. Finishes, varnishes and foils change legibility of small text. Approving from a digital rendering and discovering the difference at delivery is a familiar and expensive shortcut.

An approval record that shows what was approved and against what

Sign-off should capture the file identifier, the revision, the person approving, and the source each element of content came from. Declarations, ingredient statements, warnings and technical data belong in the artwork exactly as they appear in the specification or the supplier's documentation, transferred rather than retyped, because retyping is where a character disappears. Where content has been translated, record who performed the translation and whether anyone competent in the market reviewed it. If the pack later proves wrong, this record determines whether you can establish what happened and who carries it.

Changing a pack without stranding the one you hold

Every artwork revision has to be reconciled against printed stock already in existence and against finished goods already packed. Decide whether the change must take effect immediately, which means writing off remaining material, or whether it can wait for run-out, which means holding two versions in circulation and knowing which is which. Give each revision an identifier that appears on the pack so incoming goods can be told apart. The dangerous case is a small correction treated as trivial, released without reconciling stock, and then present in three versions on shelves simultaneously with nobody able to say which is current.

Frequently asked questions

Who should hold the artwork source files?

The brand owner, in editable original format, with fonts and linked assets included. Designers and agencies routinely retain working files, and factories keep whatever they were sent, which leaves a brand unable to make a correction or change supplier without recreating the pack. Make delivery of editable sources a condition of final payment for design work, store them where the business rather than an individual controls access, and confirm periodically that what is stored actually opens.

What artwork error most often survives to print?

Content that was correct in one place and stale in another: an outdated declaration copied from a previous version, a code that belongs to a different variant, a weight or size left over from an earlier pack, or contact details that changed. Visual errors get caught because people look at pictures; text errors survive because everyone assumes someone else checked. Proofread against the specification rather than against the last version, and have someone outside the project read the final proof.

What do I do if a labelling error is found after the pack is printed?

Establish first whether the error affects safety, a mandatory particular or only presentation, since that determines urgency and whether product already in the market has to be addressed. Take advice appropriate to the product class before deciding. Options range from an over-label applied to existing stock, through reprinting the affected component, to withdrawing units already sold. Record the decision and the reasoning, then fix the process failure that let the file through, because the same route will produce the next error.