How to Succeed at a Production Art Job

Reality of working in production art

I’m writing this because years ago I burned out. I burned out hard core. Every day felt like a drag and exhaustion crept into my workflow. Errors on sheets I was producing caused me to have projects returned. Lines on sheets blurred together, headaches from staring at a monitor all day, and all of this resulted in my vision being affected. I thought it was the end of my career. I was falling asleep driving to work, falling asleep at my desk, and falling asleep driving home. What was I going to do? Have you ever felt this way? Are you by chance stuck in a production art job and burning out? Well this article is for you.

Like many other people I put my heart and soul into my work. I really didn’t know any other way. Production is the type of field, specifically production art for graphic designers, where you are overworked and use your left side of the brain all day long. What is production art? You’re thinking of solutions for typographic challenges. You might be photoshopping an image a designer sent over that doesn’t work for a publication. You might also be converting file types. At one point I was resizing a tradeshow booth because the person who designed it did not build out the text to the right scale. You’re the gatekeeper. A lot of us take pride in being that person. It takes self confidence, accuracy, ability to recognize errors and find solutions quickly, along with good communication. What no one will tell you is that you have very little support from a team of designers who may or may not have you skill set. They don’t teach designers grammar in design school. A production artist has a background in language and design, and a strong skill set with technology.

Painful realities:

You burn out quickly without a team to support you.

When there are errors, it’s all on you.

You have to learn these skills by yourself.

Tackling Burnout

The first thing I noticed was a turnover in management. Management hired new graphic designers to focus on conceptual work. Our team had grown, but I still didn’t have a proofer for my work. More people were being added to our team who did not have the language and speaking ability to proof the corrections in my work, and guess what….management was too busy to look at it. In fact, they didn’t even care about my projects. This was a huge red flag for me. It meant less learning opportunities and less new skills I would pick up along the way. When you stop learning, you’re career dies. I became concerned, bored, and felt a lack of support. This made me proactive in self care and self discovery. I identified areas where I could seek out learning opportunities.

All of the errors that came back to our department were a direct result of no one other than me looking at these projects. Granted, there were not a lot of errors. Any error in the production world is a big deal. It can mean losses on a great scale of money for the company. I felt confused that the entire marketing team would refuse to glance at projects that required proofers. This may not be the case for you. However, when you recognize a team that does not want to assist in making the quality of a product the best it can be, that is a definite red flag. I tackled this challenge by spending more time on my projects. When I was pushed to produce more, I would explain that because I did not have assistance in proofing my work (which we know from statistics that it takes 3 people to weed out errors on a document) I would have to take more time on each project. Communication is key.

One way I tackled burnout was to identify it. At first I thought maybe I was building a tolerance to caffeine. I just had a lot of work to get done. I blamed my tiredness on driving every day. I told myself that this was all temporary and we just had a lot of projects. Next month would be better. However, I realized when I needed a 3rd and 4th coffee, something was going wrong. I discovered that unless I got organized I would never conquer my burnout. I got out a journal. I began tracking my time for self care. I blocked in times for learning and skill building opportunities, and I said no to projects I couldn’t handle.

If you’d like to learn more about production art, or building skills that will lead to an income, subscribe to my blog as I post weekly about design topics, new products, and illustration.