Production Art
Much of production art is invisible in the finished product. That doesn’t mean it’s unimportant!
Production art requires forward thinking, efficiency, precision, and attention to details. We don’t just make text and photo edits, we track brand guidelines and job specifications (sometimes across multiple pieces at once), make design adjustments faithful to the original aesthetic, produce deliverables, and maximize software capabilities to make files easy for other professionals to work with.
The line between a graphic designer and a production artist can be fuzzy; sometimes they will be the same person, sometimes they will be in entirely different departments.
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Clean and efficient files
Setting up a comprehensive template or structure as early as possible saves massive amounts of time and yields a higher quality product in the long run. A skilled production artist can provide files that are clean, efficient, and easy for a vendor or another artist to work with. This saves time and makes everyone look good.
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Text and photo edits
Production artists execute a graphic designer’s vision not just by creating or applying templates, but through editing text (sometimes altering layouts to accommodate), creating charts and graphs, and photo editing. Photo editing may involve removing a background, removing blemishes, removing objects from the foreground or background, artificially expanding the width or height of an image, or combining multiple photos to create an idealized version.
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Prepress
Another aspect of production art, at least for print, is prepress – keeping in mind any limitations of the end product that initial designers may overlook (final size after folds and trims, material or equipment limitations, etc.), handling dielines, and doing quality control checks to smooth out errors and inconsistencies.
