A Better Way to Review Creative Work

[Theresa]

Hello, everyone, I’m Teresa Jackson, and this is the CreativePro podcast, where design professionals like you come for real-world insights and practical tips and inspiring conversations like the one that we’re going to have today. Thanks for being here. We’ve got a really special episode for all of you who collaborate with others.

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That’s pretty easy to remember. It’s just podcast, all one word. Head over to creativepro.com events to check out our upcoming events for the first of next year. That includes the presentation design conference, which will be next February. The Design and AI Summit will be next April, and CreativePro Week will be in Nashville next year, and that is the end of June and to the start of July. Today’s episode, we have Mike McHugh from PageProof.

So excited to have you here today, Mike. Thanks for joining us.

[Mike]

Oh, my absolute pleasure to join in. I love the CreativePro Network. I’m quite honored to be part of the podcast today.

[Theresa]

Have we ever met, Mike? I was trying to think. Have you ever come to the States?

[Mike]

I have.

[Theresa]

To CreativePro Week? Have you been to a CreativePro Week?

[Mike]

I’ve not been to CreativePro Week, but I did live in California for about eight years. So going to events like Adobe Max, and I worked at Adobe headquarters in San Jose for a number of years. Oh, I did.

It’s entirely possible. Yes.

[Theresa]

Wow. Well, we’re going to talk about Adobe and PageProof today. I have a lot of questions for you.

This is amazing. Technology is amazing to me when it works because I’m in California. I’m in San Diego.

And where are you at? And it is the afternoon for me. It’s 2.50 in the afternoon.

[Mike]

It is 9.50 in the morning wherever I am. Next day. You’re in tomorrow.

So you might be able to tell from that and my accent where I could be. I’m on the east coast of Australia, actually in Melbourne. So it’s summertime.

Summertime. It’s going to be 31 degrees C today. So I don’t know.

That’s cold. Definitely warm. Yeah, that’s right.

So I don’t know. I’m guessing 85 or something Fahrenheit. So yeah, Melbourne, Australia.

That’s where I’m from.

[Theresa]

Yep. That’s fantastic. Are you going to come to CreativePro this year?

Do you have any plans?

[Mike]

CreativePro. Is that an invitation? Yes, I’m coming.

[Theresa]

We would love to have you. Marcus comes every year. You should join.

[Mike]

Marcus does. Yes, he does. Maybe he’ll invite me along to join him next time.

I think it’d be terrific.

[Theresa]

Tell him I said so.

[Mike]

Will do. I’m sure he’ll watch this back.

[Theresa]

There you go, Marcus. Awesome. Well, we’re here to talk.

I want to learn about page proof. That’s what this is about. I have so many questions.

I hear about it. I hear about how amazing it is.

[Mike]

Yep.

[Theresa]

I’ve heard that for years, but unfortunately, I really, at this point, I still haven’t an opportunity to actually use it myself. So I’m hoping that I can ask all the questions that our listeners are probably asking or wanting to ask, and you can help us all understand what we’re missing out on by not using page proof. Yeah.

So why don’t we just describe what it does?

[Mike]

Absolutely. So, yeah, coming from that creative background, you know, working in design or in an agency or in marketing, et cetera, there’s always a number of different levels of approval that we have to get, you know, when we’re creating this type of content, whether it be, you know, for a publication or whether it be, you know, digital assets, video, email marketing, et cetera. There’s always a different way that that occurs in different businesses.

So, you know, as a designer or a creative, even starting with a brief, you know, you might have questions around the brief and then back and forth on email around that or, you know, what does this, you know, you’re on the phone or you’re sending a, you know, a Slack or a Teams message to someone. And a lot of things get lost in that translation, even starting from the brief, and then when the first creative’s made, how do we distribute that to the right people? We’ve got to do a creative review, you know, we’ve got to get sign off from executives in our business, or indeed, if you’re an agency, you’re working with a client, you’ve got to get sign off from your client.

And if there’s feedback and changes that need to be made, how do they get delivered? And how do we make sure that they don’t get missed? And that’s kind of where PageProof steps in.

So, it’s a way of managing, you know, an entire campaign, let’s call it a campaign or an entire set of creative assets in one spot that can collate all the different versions, that can collate all of the feedback, all of the brief information, everything that’s required to make sure that that stays on track, and that all of the right people are involved, and that all of the right people are responding in a timely fashion. So, it helps optimize that whole workflow, and it’s all kept in one spot.

So, you know, a creative person or a production manager can kick off the workflow, it can be a set workflow template, it goes to all the right people, and then version.

[Theresa]

What is this one spot you’re describing? Is it like a server, like a web, like a URL, or what’s?

[Mike]

All cloud-based, PageProof’s all cloud-based. So, this can be, you know, directly through, you know, a login in a browser, all of the contents delivered there, all of the feedback can be delivered there, and all of the proofs and the various different versions are there.

[Theresa]

Is that accessible from any kind of device, like a phone or a tablet or a computer?

[Mike]

Yeah, yeah, you can. You absolutely can approve things, you know, on your phone, because it’s all in HTML, right? There’s no app required.

So, you can do that anywhere. I would say, though, approving, you know, say, a really large sort of set of documents with intricate detail on your phone is probably not a great idea. Maybe not for you and I, but I bet our kids would have no problem with it.

It would be so neat. Nice bit of detail, you know, et cetera. You could do it if you like to, but for certain things, it’s probably fine.

You know, particularly if it’s social assets, right? So, I’m approving, you know, a corporate video for our, you know, our Instagram channel, or probably best place to check it, right? You know, how does it look on your phone?

[Theresa]

Yeah, I’m thinking that it might be, I mean, maybe you start off reviewing it on a larger screen, but if you really want to know what that experience is going to be like, why not do your approval on the device where it’s going to be delivered?

[Mike]

Yeah, well, the neat thing is, if it’s interactive, you know, HTML content, you can change the view through the browser. So, you know, it can be a responsive look at it. So, if it is HTML content, you can choose what device to view it on through the browser.

So, you can say, oh, I want to view this on a small iPhone. It’s great. And it’ll adjust.

[Theresa]

It doesn’t matter where the asset originated from. Like, what type of let’s back up. Like, how many different types of applications can work with our page proof?

Are we talking PowerPoint, to Figma, to InDesign, to Photoshop, to Word, Canva?

[Mike]

Yeah, all of the above. So, it’s probably a different way that I would look at it. There’s formats, different file formats that we support.

And then there’s different integrations with different, you know, sort of creating tools or creative tools or even just tools that create content. So, the formats can be various formats can be just simply dragged and dropped into page proof to kick off a workflow. And that can be video, HTML content, you know, JPEGs, Photoshop documents, TIFFs, you know, all of those.

[Theresa]

If you’re made of Photoshop file, you could drag and drop?

[Mike]

Yep, yep. Illustrator file. You can PDF is the biggest one, right?

[Theresa]

Right.

[Mike]

You can make a PDF out of it. It works brilliantly. There’s a higher resolution, fonts included, nothing’s going to default, right?

So, that’s a smart way of doing it. Text, caption files, audio files, you know, I’m just trying to think. There’s oodles of different.

[Theresa]

Is there, maybe it’s easier to come up with a list of what doesn’t work. Is there anything?

[Mike]

Like, because if you’re making a campaign, it’s never just, oh, here’s just this printed, you know, asset. It’s video content, social media content, it’s interactive content, it’s banner ads, it’s all of these things. And so, that we have to support all of them and we do.

So, that’s all the different formats. But then we have native integrations with the tools that can create that content. So, we have an integration into Creative Cloud, for example.

And how does that work? It’s a panel that you can install into InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects.

[Theresa]

Wow.

[Mike]

You can create proofs directly from within those applications. So, it’s like a panel that shows up. You can access.

[Theresa]

Is it similar to Share for Review? Adobe Share for Review? Yeah.

It’s better, I hear.

[Mike]

It’s better, but yeah, it’s similar, yeah. And then you can place. So, there’s a, you know, if someone makes a text change, you know, they request a text change, you can use the place gun in the page proof plugin inside of InDesign to replace that text.

There’s no copy and paste, there’s no re-keying anything. It can just happen right in there.

[Theresa]

So, wait, this sounds really amazing to me. So, you have an editor or, you know, your marketing director or something and they get the proof through the page proof portal and they’re like, no, that’s not the copy we’re going to use anymore. Here’s what we have.

And they put it in the page proof portal and it shows up in InDesign and you click a button and it updates your copy?

[Mike]

Yeah, like a little comment. They put a comment in with the text that’s required. You can click on that in InDesign, it’ll show you in context where it is on the page.

You just highlight that text and replace it with what’s in the comment.

[Theresa]

And it retains all the styles and everything? You don’t have to go back and re-code them? Yep.

I’m sold.

[Mike]

It’s pretty cool.

[Theresa]

Yeah, it’s amazing.

[Mike]

So, that’s that side. But then we also have, so you would think, oh, okay, well, you know, if I’m just using InDesign, maybe there’s a different way I could do that. I don’t know.

But then when that same campaign has video content and then content that’s created with Figma and then perhaps some of the marketing team are using Canva or Adobe Express or Word, PowerPoint, Excel, we have plugins for all of those applications as well. So, the same campaign can contain content from any, you know, sort of creation tool that the team chooses to use. So, you’re not restricted to, oh, now I’m just kind of locked into this one, you know, kind of set of tools.

[Theresa]

So, my brain is spinning because that’s what it does when I get introduced to new tools and workflows. You talked about Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Canva, Figma, Express, all of them. What if you had a campaign where you’re using a half a dozen, I mean, that’s pretty typical.

You’re using a half a dozen different tools to create that campaign because it’s not just a print ad, it’s social media, it’s video. Is there a way to see all of that feedback and content in like one place so that you have a big picture of the campaign, not just one, not just the information on one asset of it?

[Mike]

Absolutely. So, there’s probably two answers to that question. So, within PageProof, we have this notion of, you know, folders for organizing all of the and collections for organizing all of the proofs.

So, we’ll take an agency for, you know, for our example here, or an internal, you know, sort of a large organization with a lot of different things going on at once. They can be divided up with different folders and then that could be, you know, let’s call it a retailer. Oh, we have a, you know, a new, you know, campaign for fall.

We have a new campaign for summer, spring, you know, we call it autumn over here. Maybe it’s autumn. And you could have one for autumn and one for fall.

And it might be different because they’re different times of the year, you know. And so, within those campaigns, within those collections rather, all of the different content can be in there. And you can run reports on, you know, what’s in that content.

So, that’s one part of it. If your organization is then using a workflow management tool. So, you know, they’re using it to assign tasks to different members of the team.

[Theresa]

Like project management, like Asana or something like that.

[Mike]

Monday.com or you know.

[Theresa]

Wait, do you connect to all of those too?

[Mike]

Yeah, we connect to those. So, as the product is, as the project is progressing, you know, through its proofing stage, the creative review, the marketing review, the executive sign-off, then that project can be automatically progressing through those steps within one of those project management tools. And you know, we support natively Monday, natively Asana, also ClickUp, Trello, Airtable.

[Theresa]

Yeah, all the big ones. So, I’m imagining you, it would work like you’re at a stage of the project workflow and four or five, maybe you need four people to review it at that stage.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Theresa]

Does it have to go in order one, two, three, four, and then before it goes to the next step? Or can you collect all of them at the same time and then when all four have, you know, checked off, they reviewed it, does it then go to the next step of the process?

[Mike]

Yeah, it, there’s a really good question, because it’s really flexible in that regard, how you set up a workflow. We call it a workflow. And you can templatize the workflows.

But I suppose it comes down to how important you want people to be in your workflow. How much power. How much power should you give them?

You know, maybe with someone like David, who’s quite fussy, you might say, you only. No comment. Just joking.

I’m never getting invited back again.

[Theresa]

David’s thinking, no, it needs to go through all of these people, and then it takes, you know, my approval before it goes on.

[Mike]

I am purely joking. But here’s what you can do. You can assign different roles to different people and have different steps.

So if you’re setting up a review of content, and you just call everyone a reviewer, that can all happen concurrently. So everyone can add their comments in, and when they’re finished, they just press finish.

[Theresa]

Can they see each other’s comments?

[Mike]

Yep.

[Theresa]

Can they override them? Can David come in and override my comments?

[Mike]

You can’t override them, but you can respond to them. Say, I don’t agree with that. You know, we spell colour with a U.

You know, no, no, no, we don’t. And that fun can happen in the comments, right? But the person that gets to decide has a different role.

So not just a reviewer. They might be a mandatory reviewer, which means they have to do something before it progresses to the next step. So you’d put a mandatory reviewer, and then there’s a gatekeeper role as well.

So a gatekeeper can go, well, I’m going to read all of these comments. It’s not getting past me until I’ve read them all and said, that’s a to-do item. That’s a to-do item.

That isn’t. I’ll send it back to the proof owner to make those changes. It won’t get past me to the next step until I hit approve.

Or I can hit approve with changes or, you know, a few different options. So if everyone’s a reviewer, it can just happen concurrently. If there’s a gatekeeper on step one, it won’t go to the next step until that gatekeeper gives it the thumbs up, which is a really important thing to be able to manage.

If the first step is a creative review, just the creative team might help each other out with, oh, I don’t like that colour or this one. The executive team or the legal team shouldn’t be commenting on that stuff. They should be looking at, well, is the price right?

Is the terms and conditions correct? And you can draw their attention to that bit in their step. You know, so you design the workflow in such a way that it rolls through those steps with the key people, you know, as gatekeepers or reviewers.

And you can have a reviewer only as well. You know, just for visibility to people. And they can send back and you can have multiple iterations before it even gets to the final sign off.

[Theresa]

Yeah. So I’ve done some project management in my past. Quite a bit of it, actually.

And people are the biggest challenge with project management. Not the projects. It’s the people, right?

[Mike]

I would agree. Yeah.

[Theresa]

Yeah. So a couple thoughts or a couple questions. The first one is, I know it can be extremely time consuming on the front end to establish a workflow.

Like all of this is amazing, but getting it all figured out and set up, that can be really challenging. Do you have like an out of the box template or maybe multiple ones depending on your typical workflow or your setup or who you work with where you can say, hey, Teresa, this will get you 90% of the way there.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Theresa]

We get from here.

[Mike]

Well, we have a really experienced customer success team that have seen, you know, everyone’s unique. Everyone’s business is unique. But we’ve seen a lot.

You know, it’s very rare that something comes up that we just go, well, that’s a real head scratcher. I don’t know how we’re going to do that. We’ve seen it before, you know, through various different things.

So we have a bunch of sort of setup templates for marketing workflows, a video sign off or branding sign off or whatever it is. But we typically, when we’re onboarding a new customer, just sit down and talk, you know, a little bit about it and tell us about how you’re doing something now. And then it’s usually a little bit of, you know what, there’s, you’ve got extra steps there because you need to.

But with our system, we can cut those out. We can do this with one template.

[Theresa]

So you have real people to onboard new clients so that they.

[Mike]

So they can get it right. We can help them.

[Theresa]

Yeah.

[Mike]

See, it’s people.

[Theresa]

It takes people.

[Mike]

I mean, some of our customers have ridiculously large workflows, like with 30 steps in them and 200 people involved, right? It’s berserk, right? Some of them are just like, it’s just a two-step thing.

We do a creative review. We have our execs look at it. Done.

You know, so easy.

[Theresa]

So my next question about the people, you know, they could be the roadblock. If there’s a roadblock in an approval process, it’s people.

[Mike]

Yes.

[Theresa]

And so my first question is, do you collect data on this? So you know where your roadblocks are? You got to know.

And then second, what, you know, what do you do if somebody gets sick or, you know, maybe quits when you didn’t expect them to leave that could create a big roadblock in a process if it’s set up to automatically go through these steps.

[Mike]

So those are two different questions. Two different questions. And there’s probably a few answers to it, depending on, you know, how big an organization is.

So, for example, it’s a good idea for every proof to have additional owners. So if I’m the proof creator, by default, I’m the proof owner. But I can have a template that adds in my second in charge as another proof owner.

Because a proof owner has various different powers over that proof. They can change the workflow halfway through. They can skip people or skip steps, or they can nudge people to get them to do something that they haven’t quite done yet.

They can manually approve something. So you can all manually just put a new version up, interrupting, you know, a set workflow. So if I’m sick, then my second in charge can do that.

You know, or we can kind of share that. So that’s kind of step one, I think, in that. The other thing is there’s automatic reminders that you can set up as a proof owner when you’re kicking off the workflow.

So remind a week before it’s due. Remind an hour before it’s due. And, you know, so on and so forth.

If you know that there’s certain people that are in and out. So the legal team, right? We need someone from legal to sign this off.

I’m kind of picking on them, but it’s easy. We love to pick on the legal team. And I love creative people, but let’s pick on the legal team.

So let’s say there’s two or three people in our legal team. And I just need one of those people to sign it off. I can put them all on as mandatory reviewers into a step.

But then I can also say, I just need the approval of one of these mandatory reviewers. So that the other two don’t need to do anything. So if, you know, Jenny picks it up and Gary and Mark are having a boozy lunch, that’s fine.

It’s that time of the year, I guess.

[Theresa]

It is.

[Mike]

I’m doing that. So you can set it up that way. So it enables that, the work to keep happening.

Yeah.

[Theresa]

Wow. Where is all this data? That’s where my head’s also going to.

You are collecting a lot of data in, I mean, by the nature of this, right? You have all the collaborators and reviewers and they’re all logging into the same place and leaving their comments and you’ll know if they’re done on a timely manner. You’ll know how many times you go back around in circles where you could look at a project at the end and go, wow, it took us way too long to get through this one step.

So how do you report on the data? How does that serve your client going forward with their next project?

[Mike]

Yeah. So first of all, the data is being collected, but we don’t see that. So no one in our team can see any proofs.

It’s a really secure system. So we have triple layer encryption, gets encrypted on the way up, gets encrypted on the way down. And it is a really secure thing.

If you’re not included on a proof, you cannot see it, even in your own organisation. So we certainly can’t see it.

[Theresa]

Yeah.

[Mike]

As an organisation, though, you might want to look at why is this set of proof taking so long?

[Theresa]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Or where are things going? Like some are going really quickly. So we have a reporting dashboard now for our enterprise customers that you can do a search either for all of your proofs, like what proofs have we got that are overdue?

And you can search it up and it’ll show all of the proofs that are in that category. And then you can run individual audits on each proof and it will give you a really detailed view of every step that happened within that proof on every version within that proof. It’s kept there for as long as you want it.

So you can see, oh, it keeps getting stuck on this step with this group or this step with these people. And so you can then make a decision.

[Theresa]

We’ve all been there.

[Mike]

We know who it is. I mean, we have our suspicions. Exactly.

Now we have proof. Yeah. This will show you definitively where the holdup is, you know, and then you can sort of you could kind of go back to the business and say, well, we need to make a change here.

Because this is really costing us a lot of money and time.

[Theresa]

Yeah. So that brings me to a question that I had, too. I would imagine that you have feedback from your customers who are using this with some general idea of how much savings they’re experiencing after maybe implementing PageProof for a year.

Like how much, how many hours or dollars or whatnot is saved because there’s a process in place for tracking the whole process from start to finish?

[Mike]

Well, first of all, we have an ROI calculated for it. And often when we when we talk to a customer about how they’re doing things, if they’re just using email, you know, except for the system in place, it’s ridiculous. Like how much they don’t believe they’re like, there’s no way that it will save us that much money.

Like it will be, you know, an 80 percent improvement over, you know, and the onboarding is really, really quick. It happens very quickly. But it’s not just everything’s in one place.

We’re cutting down on mistakes. We’re, you know, we’re saving time, but it holds people accountable.

[Theresa]

Right.

[Mike]

We’re back to the people again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hold them accountable because they they quickly figure out if I don’t do this, people see.

You know, people figure that I haven’t done my bit. Everyone else has done it. And I’m standing because I haven’t done my my bit.

So it helps that that accountability and therefore it happens very, very quickly. You know, so because people like this is one thing I can’t skip because I know everyone’s everyone’s looking at it. It’s like that, you know, when someone’s not responding to you at work, you just start adding other people on in the CC line.

[Theresa]

Send a company wide email.

[Mike]

It’s a bit like that. So but it does really hold people accountable. It holds people to a deadline and it makes things go quicker.

So when you’re talking about a return on investment, it’s I mean, we can we do that with our customers. We’re like, OK, tell us what you’re doing now. How many staff are working?

And, you know, we can average out what people get paid for the year. Have you made any print errors? Have you made any pricing errors?

What did that cost you? And we can cut down on all of that.

[Theresa]

I’m sure at this point, most any new customer that comes to you, you have a similar customer, customer you’ve already worked with. So you have an idea of what their workflow and their their issues might be.

[Mike]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We have a tremendous amount of printed packaging customers, you know, I don’t know who decided that they thought that print was going away because it I mean, go to a supermarket and have a look what’s on the shelves. I don’t know how you’re going to make that digital.

But anyway, so every single package that’s out there should be checked. You know, all of that stuff and all of the nutrition data and all of that stuff that’s really critical to get right needs to go through it. You know, a review and approval process.

[Theresa]

And this is that, you know, so if I was part of the review process, how would I get notified that something was ready for me to review?

[Mike]

Well, how would you like to?

[Theresa]

Email, text message, probably a text message.

[Mike]

Well, yeah, we integrate with Slack and Teams, that’ll just go, you know, there you go, you’ve got something to review, so that’ll just pop up. I have a folder for all the emails I get, but you can just turn those off and prefer to use Teams or Slack if you’re getting a lot. So and there’s personal settings for what you get notified about as well.

So it’s like, here’s a new proof that you need to do something on or here’s something that you previously worked on that just got approved versus here’s every single comment that’s happening. No, I don’t need to say all of that.

[Theresa]

If there’s a due date attached to that notification, could it automatically get added to a Google calendar so you could just see all the things you have due on what days are due?

[Mike]

I’m going to say yes, but I’m just guessing because I’ve never tried to do that. But we do have our webhooks available for page proof, which allows for a lot of integrations into various different ways of working. So I’m going to say yes, but I could probably you’ll figure it out if not.

[Theresa]

I’m looking at my notes to see I wrote a bunch of questions down here. What do you want to share that I didn’t ask? Probably like what’s your favorite thing that you love to show off with page proof?

[Mike]

Oh, page proof. Well, every year we do this 12 days of Christmas thing where we launch like every day we launch a new feature for our customers, which is really kind of fun. It’s like, oh, you know, there’s existing customers kind of getting like little feature presence for them.

We really stepped it up this year with a whole bunch of new features. So things like text searching, search within your proof through the browser for things that need to change. You know, there’s been a whole whole bunch of things.

One new thing is related to video that came out, which will actually display content credentials for a video. So this is my favorite thing, because I helped the team get this up and going in the in the in the product is to display content credentials. Now, for those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s a content authenticity initiative that will stamp content credentials onto content to display whether it has been generated with AI, generative AI, I think, or if it’s an original photograph or it’s been manipulated in Photoshop or one of those things.

So we can now do that for video. So why this is important is if you’re in a marketing team and you’re looking at content for approval for your brand, you might be comfortable and happy with using AI generated material for your brand. You might be happy with that.

You might not be. You might think this is against our brand. We want everything to be authentic.

We want to make sure that we use, you know, real models, you know, for modeling and I think so within the proof, the little content authenticity icon will show up and you can click on that within the proof and see where it has originated from. So being part of that, that initiative is something that I’m really super proud of, because if we’re not doing the right thing, you know, by our creatives here, it’s becoming really, really messy. And this is, you know, kind of my personal opinion on the thing.

We need to support our creatives as much as we can. Now, big, big tech companies will say that’s what they want to do, but they just want more, they just want to have more profits, right? So we produce this content, we’re going to make it easier for customers to produce lots of content, it’s going to be slop, you know, there’s a lot of slop out there.

We need to let our creatives know where that content’s coming from and give them a little bit of power to say, you know what, that’s not good enough.

[Theresa]

Yep.

[Mike]

That bit of slop just came through. So if it’s going through a creative review, and there’s something in there, you know what to look for with generative AI content, you know, as a creative, it’s either good or it’s not, it’s mostly not, you know.

[Theresa]

We had a design and AI summit in November, and a couple sessions made it very clear, the legal one, especially, that every organization should have some procedures, written procedures for how to deal with AI. What are the boundaries? Know those, so your whole team knows what you will accept and what you won’t.

You have to decide that at your organization level, but figure that out, put it in writing. And what you’ve just shared with me is that page proof will create a system where you can make sure you’re staying within the boundaries that you have established for your organization. So everybody knows what those boundaries are.

And then when you’re reviewing the content, you can confirm that they’re inside of those boundaries. It’s really important. Yep.

Yeah. Yeah, that was one of my questions. We have to talk about AI.

It seems like you can’t have a conversation tomorrow without talking about AI. So that was one of them. Are there any other AI features within page proof to help with the proofing?

[Mike]

Yeah, well, there are, yes. So we have a lot of these types of features on our roadmap. OK, one that’s in there currently, which is really helpful for a reviewer.

So, OK, we can recognize AI content within something we’re checking. But actually, here’s something that’s helpful above and beyond that. So let’s say we were working on a multi page document and we’re up to a second version, and the second version has been uploaded and I made a bunch of changes as a reviewer.

And now I’d like to look at it and I go, what did I ask to change again? That was last week. And I’ve done a million things since then.

And we recognize that reviewers, it’s not their only job to do that. They’re doing other things. So it’s pretty rare that someone’s a full time reviewer.

So we’ve given them some AI tools to help check the differences between those two versions. So you can do a side by side comparison. You can even do an overlay and see where the changes are made.

But we also have a smart check. So the smart check will analyze between the different versions and then just highlight for you what those differences are. Was a font change?

Was the document size change? Were these colors change? All of these kind of important brand time elements that you want to make sure didn’t change between, you know, like, it’s like, yeah, that change, I meant to change that.

Why has the document size changed? You know, that’s probably not right. And that’s going to make a big difference to, you know, kind of what’s going on here.

So, yeah, smart check. And so watch this space on that one. I think it’s a really critical thing that we’re working on.

Yeah, that’s implemented now. But more to come.

[Theresa]

Yeah, more to come. More like that. That’s using AI to streamline the process.

Yeah. Yeah. What else?

What else? Favorite feature. Oh, where can our listeners go to learn more about page proof?

[Mike]

They can come to my party. Australia, come and fly over there tomorrow. Fly over and ask me questions.

It’s no problem. So page proof dot com is the best place to go. There’s a really neat three minute video right on our home page that kind of gives you the high level overview.

I know we’ve touched a number of different topics there. That’s a really good place to come. And then if you want to talk to someone on our team, we have people that cover the entire globe, you know, from the US to Europe, to Australia, through Asia.

We’ve got people in each time zone that can help with any questions. So when you click on the, you know, talk to someone, there’s a real person. It’s a real person.

Yeah. It might be a New Zealander, it might be an Australian person, could be someone in the UK, like who knows? Whoever’s up, that’s who you’re going to be talking to.

And they’re very knowledgeable group of people. If we haven’t seen the problem that you’re experiencing in the review and approval process, I’ll be very, very surprised. But I’d love to hear about it.

[Theresa]

Wow. Mike, this is fantastic. You’re doing really important work.

[Mike]

Yeah, I guess one of the, you know, as I was saying before, I’ve done product management work for Adobe and, you know, worn a number of different hats. The one thing that I love about, you know, this company and this role that I’ve got is I get to work with all the creative people and I get to work with all the marketing people and these really big and, you know, sort of fun organisations and learn about all of their, you know, businesses and then help them get it right. And it’s kind of really helpful for the creative people.

It feels good.

[Theresa]

You’re helping them thrive by design. That’s right.

[Mike]

Why do I need to chase this? Oh no, I made a mistake because someone didn’t send their feedback in the right time and now I’m getting contradictory feedback because I’m getting it from different sources. That sort of stuff’s a nightmare for a creative person.

[Theresa]

Not how we want to spend our time chasing down answers to our questions.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Theresa]

We want to be creative.

[Mike]

We want to be creative. You know, we want to use design as a solution for the problem that’s put in front of us and, you know, we want to create some really great marketing material. That’s what we’re here for.

Yeah. Not the administrative chasing down people sort of stuff.

[Theresa]

So it was it was so great to meet you, if not virtually. I hope I hope we get to connect in real life sometime. I’ll just I’ll tell David I need to.

[Mike]

Tell David I’ve been invited next year. Yeah, that’ll be exciting.

[Theresa]

Well, hopefully you can come to CreativePro Week too. It would be awesome to have you there. You can tell, Marcus.

[Mike]

We can do a Python chat for everyone.

[Theresa]

Oh, that would be fun. I would love that.

[Mike]

That would be lovely.

[Theresa]

Well, I really appreciate you being here. It was great to have this conversation. I learned so much about page proof and now I need to get my hands on it so that I could give it a try.

[Mike]

I’m sure we can organize that for you.

[Theresa]

And thanks, everybody, for tuning in to the CreatePro podcast. Be sure to follow us so you don’t miss any of our episodes. And if you like this one, which, of course, you did because we gave you all the information you really need.

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