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What is finished art?
Finished art, also often referred to as production, is the phase of the graphic design process that begins when the design for a project has been decided. The finished artist brings all of the content together, i.e., text, graphs, logos and images, and styles them following the chosen design. When the client is happy to sign off on the project, the finished artist prepares the final assets, say, print-ready artwork or web-ready PDFs, and the project is brought to completion. The finished artist’s technical knowledge and skills come into play during this phase.
What a finished art workflow looks like
For this example, our finished art project is a report which will be both printed and distributed as a PDF.
The design for the project has been approved by the client. Now the finished art phase begins.
The client sends all finalised content for the report – text (.doc), tables (.xls), logos (.ai, .eps) and images (.jpeg, .psd) – and sends them to the finished artist in charge of the project.
The designer sends their visuals for the approved design to the finished artist who uses them as a reference for how the document should be laid out and the content styled.
The finished artist lays out the document using industry-standard software (Adobe InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop) and, after checking if the designer wants to make any design tweaks now that all content is in place, sends a PDF proof to the client to check.
The client checks the PDF proof and notes any changes they want made directly in the PDF using the range of commenting tools in Adobe Acrobat. Comments from several people can be combined into one commented PDF which is then sent back to the finished artist.
The finished artist works through the commented PDF, making sure all of the client’s changes have been made, then sends another PDF proof for the client to check. This process is normally repeated two or three times before a final PDF proof is sent to the client for approval.
The client checks through the final PDF proof and, once happy that they are ready to proceed, signs off on the project. Final approval is sent to the finished artist and they are instructed to go ahead and prepare a web‑ready PDF and print-ready artwork.
The finished artist performs final checks and makes sure the document is ready for both web and print. A good finished artist will have made checks like this throughout the life of the project so that there are no delays on approval. They then prepare the final assets.
A web-ready pdf is sent to the client to upload to their website and/or distribute by email. Password protection can be added to the PDF to discourage content copying – but it’s not foolproof.
Print-ready PDF artwork is sent to the printer along with print specifications. You can tell print-ready PDF artwork apart from web-ready PDFs by the printer’s marks on the page edges.