The Online Designer Tool - What is in Store?

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Copyright (c) 2009 Tony Goold

Print is a great product to buy online. its flat, we can see what we are getting and computers provide the perfect medium to edit a standard product to our specific needs. so how do the website owners decide what tools should be made available to us.

What is required by the non print literate is the provision of a simple to use tool that can be used to convert the complex native tools such as In-Design, QuarkXPress and MS Publisher in to an easier friendlier system. This though can pose two problems:- 1. making a small application will increase the speed and. a simple to use application is best and is intuitive? The one answer is a solution to both issues. Reduce the complexity and reduce the toolset into the most commonly used features that it will service 80% of the requirement.

give the customer more flexibility and it will avoid many issues with customers. Make a design tool more adaptable and it will be accepted by the masses.

The final feature set should be carefully chosen and only the best tools should be deployed to any user? I believe that common features such as the creation of a text field, the drawing of simple geometric shapes, object properties such as alignment, outline colour, fill colour, line weight are the characteristics that we will see spread to the fore in online designer tools. Tools such as these can be developed in many ways but Flash, Xml and other platforms will be the norm.

The designers of the future internet tools will not alone be required to examine the functionality but also evaluate the usefulness of the features themselves as to its worthiness to be integrated into the main programme, every feature added increases the overall size, it can slow down the application and can add to the complexity and can reduce the usability for some users. Bringing a user through the customisation section of an order process is important. If you keep a customer waiting too long you will loose the sale. Simple and Speedy makes the sale.

Online proofing of artwork will also be necessary to provide the customer with a final resemblance of the finished item. A PDF will most likely be used for this as the Adobe colour model is already integrated and is a proven colour system. The final artwork is produced in PDF format. “PROOF” is normally watermarked across the final artwork to ensure the product is printed in-house with the website that issued the artwork. With a proof it should also be possible to park a design, download the proof and get another person to view it, check for spelling and all the other things I am not good at. A proof is important to present to the customer as it give a good scene of closure. It is important that a customer realizes that they too have to adhere to the process, so delivery will be 100% correct. The customer is always right even when they don't read the terms, thinking that we crawl all artworks for spelling errors. Customers are being educated slowely that a reduced cost means the extraction of some goodies from the order process, these “goodies” can vary from site to site, but it is the customers responsibility to read the obligated delivery from the site, as when you are paying €10 for a set of business cards in Ireland, it is the onus of the customer to check the spelling of his name on the card.

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With http://www.Printclever.ie what you see is what you get. all our products are online fully editable and delivered to anywhere in ireland