Most studios treat the handover as admin. The design is done, someone zips a folder, and an email goes out with a link that expires in a week.
Six months later the client needs a new size of box. Nobody can find the dieline. Someone copies the logo out of a slide deck and stretches it. The work starts to drift, and the studio is no longer there to stop it.
We plan the handover from the first week. It is the last thing we design, and we design it as carefully as the pack.
Two Toki tins from different print runs. Toki reorders them from the printer without us.
If the printer has to call us to reorder, the handover failed. The folder should answer the question before anyone asks it.
Brandon Malfoy
Content Systems Lead
·
Origin®
What is in the folder
Files named so a new hire can find them. The name says what the file is, where it goes and what size it is. Nothing is called final_v3.
Short guidelines. Toki's run to four pages. Dielines checked with the printer and marked with bleed and folds. A photo library filed by product and by crop, so your team finds a ring or a tin without asking us.
And the colour, written down: an ink reference for each material, with a photo of the approved swatch in daylight. If a supplier changes, the new one has something to match.
The walk-through
A folder still doesn't explain itself. So we sit with the people who will use it: the founder, whoever orders the packaging, and the printer.
We open every file together. We reorder one item on the call, start to finish, while we are there to answer. The questions that come up go straight into the guide.
The printer gets a session of their own. Robin takes them through the dielines and the swatches, and they agree the ink before the first reorder, not after it.
How we know it worked
We stop hearing about files. That is the measure. Toki's tins come back from the printer in the same green. Flux reorders its tray every Monday with its cups.
When a client does call, it is about something new. That is the call we want.
