If your “proofs” are not meant for color accuracy, then what are they meant for? How do they differ from the PDF provided to you? What
real added value do they provide?
This doesn't make any real sense for either you or your customer(s).
- Dov
I can't speak for dario but I might be somewhat in the same boat.
The whole time I've been in the industry it has been standard that we send the customer a PDF of their artwork. Sometimes their artwork is provided as illustrator files, sometimes as illustrator PDFs, sometimes as a picture of their label. I think your question regarding the value added is valid. In my experience it is used to simulate expected print results (traps, potential white overprint issues, as well as resolution to other problems that their files may have).
Recently I have been receiving files from customers that have good prepress work done to them and the separations have been explicitly defined by the customer so I find myself simply placing our legend calling out the item number, dimensions and colors.
To simplify that answer, it is meant as a content "proof" to confirm that what we see in our editor is what the customer is expecting. How is our PDF different than the customers? Potentially it really is not. I am intrigued by the solution you initially suggested.
I would say even if the artwork in our PDF vs the customer's may not be different there is still value for us. That is because our PDF will be the same format and contain the same amount of information regardless of the customer or SKU. For the operator this will minimize how much "thinking" they need to do and keeps our QC department happy.
If we can also add some value to the customer that would be great. Recently I was questioned by a customer why our digital PDF differed from our physical color proof. There were valid reasons for this but it definitely made me realize that we may need to modify this process.