Nine Proofreading Tricks for Designers

No one likes a typo. Especially clients.

When it's the 14th time we've made revisions on the 128-page magazine and you need to get the files off to the printer, it's inevitable that a typesetting error or grammatical mistake is still lurking somewhere in the document. The same issues apply when completing content for a website and porting it into a CMS, where gremlins always seem to lurk in the hallways of our code.

Mistakes happen, but we can catch them. Try out the following tricks from the proofreader's playbook.

Every Word Counts

On the restaurant's Web site: penne pasta, seared oyster mushrooms, greens, basil, reggiano.

At the actual restaurant: penne pasta, winter greens, alfredo.

Not much difference, right?

Except that I was totally starving. I'd walked ten minutes out of my way in the bitter cold, just because this walk-up's food was totally killer. And they didn't say on their Web site the magic word: "alfredo."

I'm not a totally persnickety eater. I have no problem with a little cream on my noodles. They may have run out of ingredients and made a substitution in a pinch.

But what I thought I was eating for lunch wasn't exactly what I'd expected. I'd had in mind an olive oil-based sauce with shaved cheese on top... or maybe with a hint of tomato snuck into the pot while they were making a reduction.. and so on..

You've had this feeling too. This is exactly what happens when your copy on your Web site isn't precise.