[Running time: 3m 24s]
DARRAGH:
Here at Esmark Finch we offer a full range of services from design right through to production.
We have facilities on site for large format work - we do all sorts of brochures, corporate documents, point of sale collateral - really anything that could be required we’re able to find a way to handle it through our studio, right through to production.
The company was founded originally under another guise in 2002 and Esmark Finch has existed since 2013 in its current format. We’re based in the Clonshaugh Industrial Estate it’s an IVA affiliated industrial estate which is just on the northside of Dublin very close to the M1, the M50 and Dublin Airport.
In the studio we use the Adobe Creative Cloud as of course our go-to set of applications for production of artwork. It’s the market standard, it’s leading the way in a format of design - you can produce anything you want within the Creative Cloud package. Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop would be the three we of course have closest to home.
InDesign is our main focal point. We use Illustrator of course for illustrations, for creating a lot of Vector graphics and logos and we produce a lot of our imagery in Photoshop as you do but InDesign is where we really tie the room together. That’s where we bring everything in and work to produce our artwork from. InDesign is an excellent tool for that exact purpose.
Our best project? Our best project is ongoing! We have quite a few clients and we do a lot of work across a lot of facets of design for them. Point of sale is quite common it’s really increased into our daily duties now. We enjoyed the fast response you need, the quick turnaround times and the pressured situations if you like, in order to produce the artwork as and when is required. We get sharp fast briefs and we respond very quickly.
Our production facility downstairs also turns around things very very quickly and I think it’s enjoyed by the company having the capacity to turn things around very quickly!
We have a lot of facilities downstairs. We do large format printing, we’ve just recently got in a Zund so it’s a fantastic way to save time on production of large format pieces and we can also produce a lot of boxing, a lot of packaging now and it’s because we have die cutters - we have pretty much everything you would want in order to produce pretty much what anybody would want!
We’ve really expanded over the last couple of years. We’re actually, in about 6 months, moving to new premises because the expansion has been so rapid and what we’ll be doing is, when we move, we will be moving in the only new machinery, replacing all of the pieces as we go. So we will wind up with an even bigger, even fancier production facility with all new machines.
As I mentioned before we started increasing. We’ve had a big increase in a lot of point of sale work that we were doing and we found that we needed to find a new and better way to proof a lot of the artwork we were doing and turnaround time is very fast and there were a lot of updates and changes to the content as it was coming in.
So we needed to find somehow, a way to speed up that proofing process.
Generating PDFs and sending it out as proofs is a very laborious game when you’re producing a lot of artwork and you have a lot of changes to make on every round. So finding something like GoProof was a great positive to us in terms of being able to become more efficient in that process that within Adobe Creative Cloud software we can straightaway send a document out.
We can have all our clients listed within Creative Cloud now, through the GoProof tool and that allows us to fire our work out more or less instantly from within the application.
They will receive an online version of that with the possibility to download the PDF should they choose to.
It allows us to save probably, it’s hard to estimate, but I would say certainly 10 hours a week, if not more, in terms of production time through the proofing stages, which is obviously an enormous benefit in terms of getting more work done and going home on time!
One of the big sticking points for us was updating of the content. Content changes rapidly over the period of draughts as marketeers have new ideas and want to implement them into an evolving design, so constantly updating content.
Within GoProof, there is the facility for the client themselves to be able to log in and update the content that will be reflected back into our artwork.
We found that to be enormously helpful, both for us and for the client, and in terms of eliminating any mistakes that might happen, it’s a very very worthwhile tool. It makes the client more responsible for their documents and allows them to be more involved in the process.
In terms of the introduction, we started off with a single client and we experimented with them. We brought them in, we showed them the process to see how they’d gauge it and how they’d find it.
They found it very comfortable to use. They found it very easy. And likewise where it’s saved us time, it’s found to save them time too. And now they can access the artwork and see it quickly.
Plus the facility for them to be able to add comments and points to specific sections of the artwork proved extremely useful. So with that, moving forward to other clients, we were less concerned about now well they might adapt to it knowing that they can adapt fairly quickly and so it’s proven to be the case.
And now any new client that comes in, they instantly only get to know the proofing process through the GoProof network and it works extremely well now for most of our clients.
We find that we can target specific people within our clients’ operations - the key people that need to see the artwork when they need to see it - and they have the control to either update with more changes, to make requests to the design or indeed alter the content themselves and make the updates that they need as fast as possible. That ensures us to have a faster turnaround time for them and for us and get the documents to the printer’s all the faster.
We had very few clients that used to use the markup tools in Acrobat or the PDF readers. That was really not used a lot! There were a couple of people that used to do it on occasion but it wasn’t something that used to happen.
Now within GoProof, they can be far more accurate on their comments.
Sometimes a paragraph of text in an email can take it’s time to work through. Within GoProof, the markings are made right on the spot where they need to be made, so it removes any doubt and it makes sure that the delivery of information is extremely clear.
I’ve got a friend who is a designer and I was telling him about it - he’s looking it up! It is a tool that I would recommend. It has an awful lot of features that are very useful, both for our side and the client’s side. The efficiency that it can promote is definitely worth it.
GoProof have been extremely helpful whenever we’ve needed something looked at, whenever we’ve needed assistance in working through the way it works, as we ourselves got used to using it.
The response time was always excellent. The information was always a very broad and usually it was quite often followed with the phone call to make sure that we had implemented all of the suggestions successfully and that everything was working indeed as it should. The response time was always good, thoughtful and full.
We had assistant in every stage from firstly installing the little app into our Creative Cloud software to adding on new users, new clients. And especially the section where we can allow the client to update the content on their documents. They were particularly useful in guiding us through that process.
To make it brief, I would say GoProof: the benefits are strong in terms of the time it saves, the efficiency and the headaches that it can take out of the approval process.
And it’s removing those headaches where the real benefits lie.
I think it will go on to change the way designers operate within Creative Cloud which has been for a long time the tool of choice and quite probably will be for some time to come. Certainly for the foreseeable future.
GoProof is on top form in ensuring that we can save time where before we had never been able to save time.
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Darragh Kelly from Esmark Finch was talking to Emerson Welch, Marketing Director of GoProof. If you would like to share your own experience of GoProof under our Spotlight, please reach out to marketing@goproof.net with your contact details and an idea if what you’d like to share with the GoProof community.
