Why we print every identity first

Every identity we design is printed before the client is asked to approve it. Not as a final proof, which comes much later, but as a working test: on an ordinary studio printer and on the papers the brand will actually use, at actual size. It takes about two days of a fourteen-week project, and it has saved more identities than any other step we take.

What screens hide

A screen is lit from behind, so colours glow. It is usually calibrated, so they look consistent. It lets you zoom, so you rarely see a mark at the size it will really be used. Paper does none of those things. A deep blue that looks rich on a monitor can print almost black on uncoated stock. A fine hairline in a wordmark that is crisp at 400 per cent becomes a broken line at eight millimetres wide. Two greys that are clearly different on screen turn into the same grey on a recycled envelope, and a careful tonal palette collapses into one colour.

The print test, step by step

• Every application at actual size: business card, letterhead, the smallest label, the largest poster, printed in sections and taped together where needed.
• Every colour on at least three papers: a bright coated stock, an uncoated stock and the cheapest recycled paper the client might reasonably buy.
• The logo at its proposed minimum size and one millimetre below it, before that minimum is written into the guidelines.
• A photocopy of a photocopy. Somebody, somewhere, will make one, and the mark should still be recognisable.
• Everything pinned up and read from three metres, once in daylight and again under a single desk lamp after dark.

A screen is backlit, calibrated and forgiving. Paper shows you what you actually drew.

Where it changes the work

The changes are usually small and always worth it. A stroke gets thicker by a fraction. A pale accent colour is replaced by one that holds on newsprint. The minimum logo size goes up by two millimetres. On a book series we designed, the light weight we had chosen for the spines looked elegant on screen and vanished on the cream stock the printer proposed; we moved up two weights and the series held together on a bookshop shelf. Much of this we learned from printers themselves. Working with Casa da Estampa, the museum of print in Porto, put us in a room with people who had spent their working lives on presses and could tell from a PDF which of our colours would fail.

Print and screen together

None of this means paper matters more than screens. Most brands now meet their customers on a phone, and we test every identity there, in motion, in the same weeks. But screens are where designers look all day, so they are where we already notice problems. Paper is where we do not look, which is exactly why the surprises are there. An identity that has been printed, photocopied, shrunk and pinned to a wall before anyone signs it off rarely needs correcting in its first year. One that has only ever been seen on a monitor usually does, and by then it is on ten thousand envelopes.