Finishing a design is rarely one clean moment. It is a slow accumulation of small decisions that finally stop moving. The risk is that by the time you get there, you have looked at the artwork so often you can no longer see it. A checklist will not make the work more inventive, but it will make sure the inventive parts survive contact with the client, the printer and the colleague who opens your files on a machine running an older version of everything.

Fifteen questions, then — the ones worth asking before you press send.

The brief, one more time

Open the brief in a second window and read it against the final artwork rather than from memory. Does every item it asked for actually appear? Opening times, a registration number, a strapline, a call to action, the correct version of the logo. These are the omissions that turn a good project into an awkward email on a Friday afternoon.

Then ask: does this still sound like the organisation it is for? If the brief described a family-run builder and the result reads like a fintech launch, something drifted. Drift is not always wrong, but you should be able to explain it. And have you read the words, not just the layout? Spelling, capitalisation, company names, apostrophes. Reading copy aloud catches more than scanning it, and it is far cheaper than a reprint.

Grid, alignment and breathing room

Zoom out until the page is the size of a postage stamp. Composition problems reveal themselves at that scale: elements that feel weightless, columns that lean, a headline with nothing holding it in place.

• Is everything aligned to something? Not almost aligned — aligned. A 2mm difference reads as a mistake rather than a decision.
• Do the margins and gutters hold up at every size? Check the smallest and largest use, not only the version on your screen.
• Does the hierarchy survive a squint? If you cannot tell where to look first with your eyes half closed, the reader will not know either.

Optical adjustments are fine and often necessary; a circle needs to overshoot slightly to look the same size as a square. Just make sure each one is deliberate rather than the residue of dragging something into place.

Typography: the details people notice without knowing

Nobody thanks you for clean typography, but everyone feels it when it is off.

• Is the type hierarchy in the right order? Headline, subhead, standfirst, body, caption. If the caption shouts louder than the subhead, rearrange it.
• Are the small details tidy? Curly quotes rather than straight, en dashes for ranges, no double spaces, no single word left dangling at the end of a paragraph.
• Is it legible at the size it will actually be used? Nine-point grey type looks elegant on a large display and disappears on an invoice.
• Are your styles consistent? Three greens, two body sizes and a stray paragraph in a different font are the small tells that suggest nobody finished the job.

For display type, kern the large pairs by hand — a capital A against a T, a lowercase r beside a full stop. At 12pt nobody notices; at 120pt everybody does.

Colour, contrast and honesty about output

Are the colours correct for where this is going? A palette sampled from a screen will not match a printed job, and a document destined for a photocopier will flatten subtle tints. Convert deliberately, check the values against the brand guide, and say so if a colour cannot be reproduced exactly.

Does text hold up against its background? For body copy, aim for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against whatever sits behind it, and never rely on colour alone to carry meaning — a red alert dot needs a word or a shape beside it too. It takes two minutes and makes the work usable by more people.

Exports and handover

Do you know what each file is for? If you cannot say in one sentence who will open a file and what they will do with it, it probably should not be in the folder. A typical handover might include a print-ready PDF with bleed and crop marks, screen-ready images at the right dimensions, an editable source file, and a version with live text for anyone who needs to copy from it.

Then, will these files open cleanly on someone else's machine? Embed or outline fonts, embed linked images, flatten transparency where the printer asks, and label RGB and CMYK files clearly. Name everything predictably: client, project, item, version, date. "final_final_v3" tells the next person nothing.

Good files are part of the design. If the client cannot use what you sent, the work is not finished.

Presenting it so the client can say yes

Before you present, be sure you can explain the reasoning behind the main decisions in plain language — why this typeface, why this layout, why the logo sits where it does. Clients rarely need the theory, but they do need a reason to defend the work to their own colleagues.

Show it in context. A poster on a wall, a screen at arm's length, a banner seen from three metres. Point out what changed since the last round, and keep a short list of anything you tried and set aside; it saves you re-explaining later and shows the thinking was thorough. When you send it, keep the covering email short and specific: what is attached, what you need back, and by when.

The last ten minutes

Before you call it done, have you opened every file you are about to send? Not the ones on your working desktop — the exported ones. View the images on a phone. Print one page at 100% if print is involved. Check that the PDF opens without a missing-font warning and that nothing reflowed in the conversion.

Then sleep on it if you can, or at least make a cup of tea and come back. Fresh eyes catch the stray full stop, the logo that sits two pixels out, the phone number with a digit missing. Run the fifteen questions once more, fix what they turn up, and deliver with a short note that makes the next step obvious. That is what finished looks like.

Photo: 27707 / Pixabay