Speaker 1: Welcome to Design Domination, where you'll learn to become a better, more business savvy designer so you can dominate your competition. Hi, and thanks for tuning in. I'm Colleen Grotzer, and in this episode of Design Domination, I'm talking about how to manage client revisions to your design proofs. Do clients often point out that you missed some of their edits in page proofs? Sometimes that might be because you didn't double check the edits, and sometimes it's due to unclear communication on the part of the client. And it usually means you end up creating more drafts than you need to, which just slows down the process. Well stick around, because I've got a bullet proof process that will help you stay on top of them, and these tips will help you save face, and save time, and will make for an easier revision process. First off, you should always let the client know how you want them to send edits. Lead the process. Otherwise, you don't know what you'll end up getting, and you don't want to have to ask the client to redo things the way that you wanted them to be done originally, because you didn't specify that up front. For example, early on in my career, a few times, clients would send me a whole new Word document, and usually without track changes. I mean, ugh, redo the whole layout with a new file? No thanks. Now, for page layout, PDF format is the way to go to get edits from clients. And one reason is because PDF makes it easy for clients to convey edits. I've had clients send emails with lengthy text explanations. I've had clients take photos of pages they printed out and wrote on. I've seen all kinds of things that look like they were a lot more work than they needed to be. Lots of steps. PDF not only makes it easy for clients to convey where an edit is needed, but it makes it easy for you to see where an edit needs to be made in the layout. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? Nothing's worse than getting emails or a Word document telling you to move this paragraph to page 5, paragraph 2. By the time you've made those kinds of edits, other elements have changed position. So any other references that the client has made in terms of relative positioning like that will be off. It's so frustrating. And then you have to pull up the previous proof to figure out what the heck they were talking about. PDF also makes it so you can view the layout, but with the comments, so it's faster. There's no hunting around for things or trying to figure out what used to be paragraph 2 on page 5, for example. With other forms of providing feedback, unclear edits are often an issue. It's time-consuming to go back and forth and question something because the client didn't write legibly, or you can't tell what they were pointing to, or there are multiple comments in the same spot, making them hard to distinguish from one another. And also, I don't know how many designers nowadays understand proofreader's marks or how many clients use them anymore. So PDF is the way to go for any page layout. It just makes it so easy. Now, before I send out proofs to clients, I always give the file name a number at the end to denote which round we're on. And that makes it easy for both parties to know where things stand, especially if you've, well, hopefully allotted a specific number of drafts to the project. So how about sending design proofs for review? I'm sure you're probably already emailing PDF proofs to clients, and hopefully only to one point of contact, which I recommend. But did you know you could also send a PDF to clients from within Acrobat? It's a feature called Send for Comments. You can send a PDF to one or more people for review. Now what I like about this feature is that, one, you don't have to worry about sending large files through email, which can be problematic. The file gets stored in the cloud, unless you use the Send as Attachment option. Number two is if the client needs to discuss something with other people, then you could add them to the review. Plus, they don't have to then email around the PDF to others, either, and try to keep track of multiple versions and what's been reviewed and by who. They can just discuss it right in the PDF. And the third reason I like it is because you can see if they've opened the PDF, and you'll get notified as they comment. Now to send a PDF for review from within Acrobat, you want to first export your PDF, and then open it and review it to make sure everything looks okay, and then click the Send for Comments icon in the right-hand vertical toolbar. If you don't see a Send for Comments icon there, go to Tools, Share and Review, and then click Add under Send for Comments. Once you click Send to Comments, you'll see a few options. You'll see the file name at the top, and then a space to invite people to review it by adding their email addresses. I add my email address to it as well so that I get the email with the link to the proof. You can choose whether you want them to view the file, review it, or fill and sign it. Choose Review File for proofing purposes. And you might also want to assign a deadline to it. Alternatively, you can choose Get the Link and send the link to anyone who needs to review it. The recipients will then get a link to the PDF via email, and that will take them to the online PDF review in their web browser. They do not need to have the full version of Acrobat in order to use this feature or to access the commenting and markup tools. And in fact, this is how I've sent files for years to people who didn't have the full version of Acrobat just so they could access those commenting and markup tools. Now in Dropbox, the process is very similar. You simply export the PDF, upload the PDF to Dropbox, and then share the file with the client or send them the link to the file. And then what's cool is that the client can comment right within Dropbox on the PDF. You can also send a file for review from within the latest version of InDesign, 15.1. It's a feature called Share for Review. Apparently, it negates the need to create a PDF because the recipients view the file in their web browser. You can access this at the top of the InDesign interface. It's the icon next to the lightbulb icon. The file then gets uploaded to the cloud to your Adobe account, and recipients will get an email about it. And you can then find the file under your account in Your Work. I have not used this feature myself, but there's a lot of discussion about it in an article called Introducing Share for Review on the InDesign Secrets website and the pros and cons to this versus a PDF. Now once the client is done marking up the proof, you'll need to access it. Of course, they can just email it back to you if that's how you sent it initially. But if you're using Acrobat's Send for Comments feature, there are several ways to access the marked-up proof. You can go to Acrobat, and then Home, and Shared by You. And there you'll see a list of files that you've shared, and you can sort them by date of last activity, or by filename. It can help to view this list both ways, if you're trying to see which file has been commented on most recently, or if you want to view a particular file. You can also get the link via the email that Acrobat sends you, if you included yourself in the review. You can log into your Adobe account online, or the Creative Cloud app, where you'll see notifications telling you which file has been commented on, by who, and what the comment says. You can also go directly to documentcloud.adobe.com, where you'll see the list of files shared, and when they were last modified. When you open the PDF to view the revisions, you will see a list of sticky notes, strikethroughs, highlights, and so forth. You will also see who made each edit or comment. And you can reply to a comment, or you can tag someone by typing an at symbol, and then the start of their email address. Now what's cool is that no matter which way you opt to view the PDF, everything is synced. So it doesn't matter where you view it, whether that's online, or in Acrobat. And if you view it online, there's the option to open it in Acrobat. If you're using Dropbox, I use the free version, you will also see a list of comments and who left them, similar to how you would in Acrobat. Now I know there's Dropbox Paper, a collaboration tool, but I've never used that and I don't know if that's for getting feedback from clients, so I can't comment on that. When it's time to make edits to the source file, you know, you might want to do the quicker edits first, or maybe you want to do the more time-consuming tasks first. So you might end up skipping around the file, which is fine, but you want to make sure you don't miss any edits. So it's really great to be able to check off each comment, you know, as you go in the PDF, in Acrobat, or the comment in Dropbox, whichever method you're using. What I really like about Acrobat for this is that you can filter comments, and by many different options. Read versus unread, checked versus checked, as in checked off or not, or resolved or unresolved, the commenter, and the type, whether that's sticky note, highlight, etc. This is the key, right here, to ensuring that you've made all the edits. It couldn't be any easier. You've got your list of comments, and once you've made the edit in the source file, just check it off in the PDF, or mark it as resolved, whatever you're doing. And if you're using Dropbox, just mark the comment as resolved. There's just no excuse to miss any edits that the client has sent you, even if your document is hundreds of pages long. Like I said, it also makes it easy to skip around, or to work on sections of a document, and know what you've done, and then where you've left off. In Acrobat, you can change how the comments list is ordered, and that's by page, which is the default, segmenting the requested edits by page number, in the PDF file, there's also author of the comment, the date the comments were posted, the type of comment, and read versus unread. And by the way, I've got screenshots of these items on the episode page. You can also search comments. I mean, all of this just makes it so easy to find what you need. I don't know, maybe I'm geeking out over this too much, but I've worked on a lot of large, complex publications, so I need this. Plus, I remember the feeling early in my career when a few clients pointed out some edits I had missed that I really shouldn't have missed. I hadn't checked my work, and I really should have. I also know how many clients have told me over the years how I've set myself apart from other designers by being so reliable. That's in part because I check my work and I pay attention to detail. The other thing I like about checking off comments in the list is that if you have a question on one of the edits, leave it unchecked or unresolved to remind yourself to ask the client about it. If you've used the send for comments feature in Acrobat, you can reply to a comment or tag the commenter and ask a question right there. Now if you've emailed the PDF to the client and they've emailed it back, rather than using the Acrobat send for comments feature, which is fine, you can save the PDF file as you go down the list and check off the comments, or mark them as resolved, whichever method you choose. Using send for comments, though, if you save the PDF, then you will only be saving comments made up to that point. So I ask the client to let me know when they're done reviewing, and then I save the PDF with comments and I keep it for my records with the project, and in case I need to refer to it later. I'm all about keeping track of those things, just in case. If you're using Dropbox, the caveat is that the comments do not save with the PDF. So if you want to save the comments, and I recommend that you do, especially for more extensive projects, then you'll need to take screenshots of them or do a loom screen recording of the document. That will at least give you the ability to retain them somehow, but you won't be able to search the comments anymore because they're no longer live text on the webpage in Dropbox. If you're using InDesign, you can import comments from the PDF into InDesign by going to Window and then PDF Comments. The comments then appear in a list in that panel in InDesign. Each comment has a corresponding icon on the page where the comment was left, just like you'd see in the PDF. As you work in InDesign, you can tick off the comments in the list there. Now I've not used this feature other than to try it out while preparing this episode. I went and imported comments from a PDF of one section into an InDesign file of the full book. The comments showed up in the panel, but they didn't correspond to a comment icon on the pages. But maybe that's because I imported comments from only one section of the PDF. I don't know. There is some discussion on importing PDF comments into InDesign on the InDesign Secrets website. I really hope that these tips will improve your workflow, making it more efficient for you and your clients. Plus it will put you in charge of the process and show clients that you pay attention to detail, which will get you more respect. Clients don't want to babysit. And those are their words, not mine. If you found this helpful, would you please do me a favor and leave a review on whichever app you tune in from? I want to continue creating content like this for you, and more often, and that would really help me out. For more tips on getting feedback on your work, be sure to check out episode 24, 7 Mistakes When Presenting Design Work and Asking for a Critique. Do you want to get more respect and command higher rates? I can help you go from order taker to expert through mentoring, my free guides, and premium resources such as my brand style guide builder, brand identity builder, and my website accessibility course. You can find out more at creative-boost.com. You can also join me and other creatives in the Design Domination Facebook group.