Mistakes happen. Some even say you should make mistakes faster so that you can learn from them! They can’t be completely avoided, but if you know what to look for, you can learn something without the pain of living through the aftermath.

A while ago , I posted Three Devastating Mistakes Every Designer Will Make and How You Can Avoid Them. I know it helped at least one person!

I thought maybe you’d like to see three more mistakes I’ve both seen and made.

Mistake: Setting an Incorrect Bleed

How It Can Happen: If you create a flyer in Illustrator or Photoshop (though you really need to be using InDesign or Quark!), there is no easy way to set up bleed except by making the document dimension larger, which you will probably forget to do. Bleed is not set by default in InDesign but it is very important if you want your images to go all the way to the edge of the paper. Bleed allows enough room for the trimmer—the machine that cuts the paper down to its final size after printing—to be slightly off without affecting the final piece.

What Will Happen: If you don’t include bleed, there will probably be a sliver of white around the edges of your final product where there should have been picture. The page will also look like it was cut crooked.

How to Fix It: Check bleed settings in InDesign by going to File>Document Setup. A dialog box will appear and if you don’t see fields to fill in Bleed, click the More Options button on the right side.

Standard bleed settings are 1/8 inch (0p9) to 1/4 inch (1p6). The bleed lines are noted by a red stroke around the outside of your document in InDesign. Make sure all your images and graphics that are supposed to go to the paper’s edge actually continue all the way to meet these red lines.

Mistake: Sending CMYK Images plus all the fifty spot colors from the various sponsor logos to your printer

How It Can Happen: If you are compiling a brochure of ads or logos for, say, a tradeshow, be sure to change the logos to not include spot colors. Spot colors are an entirely separate ink; they do not use the four process colors—Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black—to make up their color.

What Will Happen: If you send a normal CMYK file with a spot color, you will be using FIVE inks instead of four, which worst case scenario is more costly (the client may pass on that extra cost to you and/or not give you work anymore) and best case scenario, the printer will call you and ask if that’s really how you want to print your brochure. At that time thank the printer profusely and promptly change the colors and resubmit your files.

How to Fix It: You can tell InDesign to consider spot colors process colors instead by going to the Swatches Palette, double clicking on the PMS color and changing the Color Type to Process (instead of the default, Spot). Notice the icon next to the color changes to note the process vs. spot color.

Mistake: Not Cleaning Up Masks

I, of course, am never guilty of this because I had an excellent Photoshop teacher that made us completely redo our masks if we weren’t pixel-perfect. However, I’ve downloaded several stock images where the photographer has gone in and “enhanced” the image with extremely poor results and naturally you download flattened files so there’s no going back to fix it. Hopefully in these cases, you are good at retouching images.

What Will Happen: It just looks really bad! When I see a bad mask job, I know the person is sloppy and possibly rushes through jobs faster than s/he should. That doesn’t reflect well on you and you certainly better not have “Detail oriented” on your résumé!

How to Fix It: Masks are one of those things, like the Pen tool, you just have to buckle down and make yourself familiar with. You can check to see if your masks line up with the image or cover up the parts of the image the way you want by adding a layer below the masked layer filled with black or white (whichever is in higher contrast with your image). This way, you can easily see pieces that are not hidden properly.

It’s also a good idea to completely fill the rest of the mask with black or white, even if this extends beyond the image; it ensures no stray pixels around the edge show through. You can check your mask to see if you have pure white (reveals image) and pure black (hides image) where you want it by Alt/Opt+Click on the mask icon in the layers palette.

If you didn’t understand any of the terminology in this article (jargon like spot, CMYK and RGB), then check out the Graphic Design Glossary! If you find any words missing, let me know and I’ll add them.

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