Design – Page 4 – TwonaBlog

September 3, 2022January 24, 2023

Stress-Free Packaging Rebranding

Photo by myriam-zilles-KltoLK6Mk

As difficult as it may be to recognize it, we sometimes have a hard time adjusting to change. It is that adaptation process what seems like an uphill task.

For a pharmaceutical lab to be competitive, it needs to keep adjusting their processes; using new tools that make work more efficient, or renewing their brand image, for example. And that is the aspect we are going to focus on.

Rebranding and its feared companion: the new Guideline

A rebranding is a brand image change that affects a company’s products and packaging and which rules are collected in a document, named a guideline. Some of the changes that these entail are:

New corporate design.
New color ranges.
Fonts.
Icons, logos.

Finding the necessary information to adjust your designs in a document of 30, 60 or maybe even 150 pages, can be complex. Do you imagine working each day with such a lengthy document?

If you have never gone through a rebranding process, here is a shocker: no guideline, none at all, ever, has covered all possible cases. I mean exceptions, nearly impossible implementations, small formats like a label or adjusting those rules to a double molecule, with hidroclorotiazide, for instance.

How to handle a rebranding in an efficient manner?

When you first get introduced to a new guideline, a mix of feelings arise: it is both exciting and challenging at the same time. Before you start hyperventilating at the thought of how complicated it can become to check that or another details, make sure you do this: simplify the document into smaller sections, so you can solve each case separately, focusing on what is important.

The key is to divide the information in several areas, one way is for instance by type of product:

Folding Box
Leaflet
Labels

Whatever division you choose from, it should answer one question: “How do I design/ review a …” > For example, for a Folding box, as it is a very common product that has a rather high complexity.

The procedure to design a box from the guideline is then dissected into smaller pieces that compose it: front face/back face/secondary faces/closing sleeve…

Each section of the divided guidelines will obviously have to contain all its specific rules, and always have images/drawings of real examples. Make sure to also define margins, corporate elements, proportions, and colors, besides the actual content of that box face.

My recommendation is to leave exceptions or special cases to the end. Make sure that the section covers 90% of the cases and leave the 10% for the end of the section.

Similarly, from my experience, besides splitting up information into more agile documents, I would recommend creating templates for the most common cases. It is also very useful to generate checklists that contain the key elements that cannot be missed. Both of these will help you tremendously on the final review.

And you? What tricks do you use to make your rebranding projects simpler and less stressful?

If you are currently going through a rebranding process or it is in the planning, and you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me. Good luck with that rebranding process!

Rafael Cruz Núñez
Artwork Manager

August 10, 2022February 3, 2023

My experience in managing Packaging Artworks

Photo by Felipe Furtado - table with postit notes and markers. Experience briefing and process steps — *Photo by Felipe Furtado*

I have been working over 15 years in the packaging industry, particularly all related to Regulatory affairs.

In all this time, despite the regulatory changes that have influenced formats, texts, graphics … variations, the day to day process of Artwork creation for packaging materials has remained quite stable.

What has changed, and exponentially, are the tools that help us manage the creation and review of Artworks, both on the process side, and on the quality side.

If you have been around in this industry for a while, you probably remember a lot more paper. Paper to start an Artwork, paper to manage the changes, paper to check that the reviews were made, and paper to add it to the archive.

How much paper do you have right now on your table?

You probably have things stored on the intranet, or maybe even on the cloud. This means that it does not matter where you are, or where you are, you are able to check or execute any work you need remotely. Think about how some companies have suffered when they were not able to function normally without being physically in the office.

Nowadays, most seem to have this storing function under control. But this is just a part. In order to have a final document to store (wherever it is) , you need a process of information collection, design creation, review, approvals, checks and changes and version control, until you end up with the final material.

How do YOU manage all this process?

Many handle it via email, mixing external tools to share large files because their email capacity is limited. Possibly, you also use a spreadsheet to track open processes, but without any traceability or automatic control of “where” each Artwork is at each moment.

That was me also around 2005.

And this is how Twona AMS was born, our Artwork Management System. It was developed around the same needs that your team may have. We did not want to “suffer” more, and we knew there were better ways to manage all those processes within a single tool.

One of the biggest advantages of using Twona, to my own view, has always been the increase in visibility. Visibility of all the projects we were handling; but also, of all the information related to a new design/change, all in one single place.

Thanks to this, we are able to manage priorities with agility, distribute work in a more balanced manner, and we avoid generating bottle necks when a colleague is out of the office. This has all resulted in faster turnaround of Artworks.

Additionally, we can send a request for review directly from the tool, internally and externally, and see all comments, messages or additional documents all in one single screen. This helps tremendously with the editing process and with reducing the number of iterations needed before we can consider an Artwork as ready for print.

We, as well as our clients, also use some quality tools to review Artworks – these are embedded in Twona and accessible with just a click. But I will talk more about this in another moment, not to take much of your time.

If my post has triggered your curiosity and want to know how an Artwork Management System in the cloud works, or think that there may be some processes susceptible of improvement within your team, access this link to get more info or ask for a demo.

July 21, 2022February 3, 2023

The Perfect Artwork Request / Briefing

Photo by afif-kusuma-RjqCk9MqhNg-unsplash

Depicts a dartboard with red darts on it — Photo by *afif-kusuma-RjqCk9MqhNg*

What is an Artwork Request/Briefing?

An Artwork Request is the start of the journey for a design agency. It contains the description of work that needs to be done on a design so that it meets all the necessary requirements to be ready to print and produce. This is applicable to both new designs and edits, and covers the process until it has gotten the sign off from all necessary departments and external parties.

Your design agency/studio needs a good request so that they can translate those requirements into a good artwork version.

Why is a perfect artwork request/briefing important?

It guarantees that you, as a client, get what you are expecting from your designs
It will reduce the number of back-and-forth iterations to complete the project
It assures that the chance of error is kept to a minimum
It makes turnaround times faster

Sounds simple. But in reality, it is not always so.

Why is that?

The reality is that many of the people making change requests do not create their information themselves, but they receive it from a third party (or sometimes even fourth). Frequently in a different language.

Furthermore, the level of understanding and knowledge about design/printing specifics of everybody involved in the artwork process varies a lot: across organisations, across different roles, across countries. It is literally impossible to expect that every single person involved knows the same, and that they are good at translating that information into an actionable instruction.

When that happens, and not enough/clear information is provided, it is very easy to fall into a trend that leads to extra time to ask questions and get answers, and to obtain and provide the right details (measurements, keylines, logos, images…).

What is then the perfect request?

The perfect request is one that describes the changes required in a way that makes the outcome anticipated clear and agreed on by both the requestor and the executor, but also other parties that may need to get involved later (e.g. manufacturer).

The perfect request should cover 5 main areas:

Product guidelines – becoming familiar with the client’s guidelines is a pre. All designs must follow these, so they become a hidden requirement after the first iterations with a customer, but nonetheless, a very important item to request at the beginning or refer to.
(Manufacturing) technical requirements – any printer/manufacturer requirements are important to understand so that the artworks are not sent back for adjustments at the last step of the process.
Key data – including the text, changes to this, and graphics that the artwork needs to include and any earlier mockups or open artworks that may exist.
Keylines – attach these always to a request, as using a wrong one will require big changes to your artwork versions.
Format specifications – dimensions and other details about the artwork.

Obtaining this information may require interaction between different departments. It may be best to ask the experts on each area to pitch in to your request so that you get the right information in one go. Also important to have one system where to collate it all, rather than letting it fly through emails and attachments. But we can talk about that another time!

The important thing is to establish a great collaboration between your design agency and your quality and/or regulatory teams. They, together, need to manage the workflow process in a way that brings an artwork from request to execution with the least amount of changes and time to market.

And this collaboration starts with defining what is for your company a perfect starting point, using the above criteria, and what information needs to be provided and by whom at the start of the process.

Do you already know what YOUR perfect request looks like?

Share with us your perfect briefings via: marketing@twonas.com!