Are you an Artwork Coordinator?

After all, you have to direct several people or teams who in turn take care of the recipe image, the graphical presentation, the brand logo, the product information and the packaging.

Packaging labelling or artwork is a collaborative activity where each player has his own precise task or score, which must be respected, just as it would be in an orchestra: after all, the first violin would never take the place of the flute, and vice versa. If this ever were allowed to happen, failure may be inevitable.

In fact, a clear definition of everyone’s roles in this complex process is the first way to assure a flawless performance.

A conductor – in addition to experience – has a rostrum or podium, from which he oversees, listens, controls, and calls to order the orchestra. And then the musical score, which indicates the tempo of execution, the points at which each member of the orchestra must be introduced and the beginning and the end of each movement or phase.

Now, let’s understand who the players are in your packaging artwork orchestra:

Marketing – Taking care of the brand, helping to scope the creative brief and tailoring the consumer messaging.

Quality Assurance – Responsible for the product content on the label. Working with food technologists to generate the technical data such as the ingredients list, weight, shelf life and nutritional tables.

Legal – Checking compliance with the legislation, making sure that no claims are misleading.

Technical – Owning of the development of the packaging, producing the “cutter profile” or “technical drawing” and adding any manufacturing requirements.

Graphics Agency – Receives the brief and executes the artwork file.

Prepress/Printer – Takes the final approved file and makes ready for printing, verifies content and colour

With all these independent virtuosos at your disposal, what can go wrong?

All or nothing, if nothing else, realising the packaging artwork is always a source of stress, a pinch point of the launch process:

Unlike the conductor, maybe you don’t have a podium or even a baton or wand to direct and manage the entire workflow. Moreover, the continuous rework on the artwork and the arrival of changes during the later stages, can generate errors in the text, often simple typos but then errors in foreign language copy may be missed with more serious consequences.

Of course, in the end, your experience, dedication and the skill of your collaborators makes the concert – i.e. product launch – come to a conclusion. If it goes well, there may be some stuttered applause, if not, the audience falls silent, as you consider a quick revision or at worst a market withdrawal.

What you need is a supervision tool that allows you to monitor every single processing step and this is what 4Pack does: it allows the Artwork Coordinator to efficiently manage the entire product life cycle, maintain total control of the assets, monitor every single processing step. In other words, it gives you the score to lead your group, just like an orchestra. It takes care of tuning too!

With 4Pack you can set up a workflow in which the different steps are assigned to specific individuals with specific margins of operation. This gives you control and supervision over the entire production process and allows you to easily identify critical issues and solve them.

Each user can access via browser, with or without IP restrictions. The users can collaborate on the platform from wherever they are working, confident they are always working to the latest version of content or artwork. Artwork comments are automatically collated, nothing is lost. Moreover, the team are able to focus on delivering high quality performances.