My First Big Print Design Project

I was ecstatic when I was approached by MSY Technology to create their Christmas Madness Sale catalog for 2010.

Okay – I’m jumping a little ahead of myself here. Initially, my services were recommended to MSY by a friend of mine, Letitia Surdonjic, who also specialises in graphic & print design. She already had too much work on her plate at the time, which is why she referred MSY to me.

I was then contacted by the Business Development Manager of MSY, Alex Surdonjic (Letitia’s uncle), asking me to provide them with a quote to design an 8 page catalog for their 2010 Christmas sale. This was going to be MSY Technology’s first official catalog to be printed and distributed all around Australia, and they were very happy with what I proposed, and here we are – obviously I got the job!

With 26 stores Australia-wide (at the time of printing the catalog), I instantly knew that this was going to be the biggest print design job that I’d ever had the opportunity of taking on. I was both excited and nervous about the thought of the 1,000,000 copies being distributed all around Australia – that’s right – one million copies!

The only catch was – we had 2 weeks to get it all done and distributed! This included:

1. Creating preliminary concepts and planning out the general layout and design of the catalog.
2. Contacting vendors and suppliers of all the products on sale in the catalog, and organising all of the assets that were needed from them for the catalog design.
3. Creating and designing all 8 pages of the catalog.
4. Submitting the catalog design to the necessary parties for reviewal and carrying out any necessary revisions.
5. Sending the catalog design to the printer to get proofs done and carrying out any more changes if required.
6. Printing out all 1,000,000 copies of the catalog, and
7. Distributing all of the catalogs to their necessary locations to be delivered all over Australia… oh boy!

With some late nights, perseverance, and a big helping hand from Alex with sourcing most of the assets – believe it or not – we did it!

We were all very pleased with the end result of the printed catalog and looked forward to seeing how the MSY Christmas sale would go.

You can visit the MSY Technology website today to check out the great deals they have on offer, and place your order via their online store.

Share your first print design story

If you’re a designer of some sort, perhaps you’d like to comment and share your first big design job experience below – I’d love to hear how it all went!