Test it at the shop door

Every design looks good at full zoom on a large monitor, in good light, with nobody waiting behind you. That is the one place your customers will never see it.

They’ll see your box from the shop door, your pouch in a tent by torchlight and your map in the rain with one hand free. So before anything goes to print, I take it to the place it will live and try to make it fail.

Find the worst moment

Every object has a moment when it’s hardest to use. That moment is a better brief than any mood board, because it tells you what has to work first.

For a cake box it’s the first glance from outside the shop. For trail food it’s the end of a long day in the cold. For a walking guide it’s a junction in the drizzle, with the bus due and a dog pulling on the lead.

Write that moment down in one sentence before you design anything. It settles arguments later: when someone asks for a smaller name and a bigger picture, you hold the idea up against the shop door and see which wins.

Four tests I run on everything

The tests are cheap and a little silly, and they catch more than any review on screen. I print the design at full size, on the real material where I can, and take it somewhere ordinary.

Distance

Prop the design where it will stand and walk away until you can’t read it. For Bolo the name on the lid had to be clear from the door, about four metres off, which set the letters at 6 cm tall before I’d chosen a typeface.

Ask someone who hasn’t seen it

You can read your own design from anywhere, because you already know what it says. Ask someone in the queue to read it from where they stand, and believe them.

Hands

Use it with the hands your customers will have. Rumo’s pouches were tested in ski gloves, which moved the tear notch 10 mm lower and made the day number large enough to find without taking a glove off.

Weather

Get it wet, cold or sticky, whichever its life will bring. The Cais guides went on a walk in steady rain before the print run, and the orange route line, which looked bold on screen at 1 mm, faded into a damp page. It went to 2 mm, and the next wet walk was uneventful.

Light

Look at it in the worst light it will get: a head torch, a dim kitchen, a phone screen turned down in the sun. Last Light’s key art was drawn on a calibrated monitor and looked right there. On a living-room television, the night sky sank to black and took the lighthouse with it.

We’d only ever seen the lighthouse on our own monitors. On a living-room television it simply wasn’t there.

Co-founder, Farol Games

We lifted the darkest blues a few steps and checked again on three screens. Nobody playing the game will ever notice the change, which is how it should be.

What the tests usually change

The fixes are rarely dramatic. They’re small moves that add up to something people use without thinking about it.

None of these would have shown up on a monitor, and all four would have cost far more to fix after printing than the afternoon it took to find them. The rain test on the Cais guides cost me a soaked jacket and saved a reprint.

Notice that none of the changes is about taste. Nobody argued about whether 2 mm looked nicer than 1 mm. The test answered it, and the design meeting got shorter.

Take it outside before signing off

You don’t need a lab or a panel. Print a few copies, take them where they’ll live and watch someone use them who hasn’t heard your reasoning:

• Stand at the door and read the shelf.

• Open the pack in the gloves your customers wear.

• Check it under the dimmest light it will meet.

It takes an afternoon, and it’s the cheapest afternoon in the whole project. If you have something on its way to the printer, show it to me and I’ll tell you where I’d take it first.