The computer has had a profound effect on the way designers work, adolescent versions of the layouts can be saved or discarded at will - type sizes, leading, track, margins, the number and width of column and the spaces between them can easily be changed. In fact, it is all too easy to keep revising the design and never reach a conclusion.

There will come a time when you will sit back, take a long, hard look at your layouts and ask yourself "do they work?"

Don't limit the question to yourself, for even the most experienced designers discuss their design solutions with each other. Ultimately, however, the decision is your own. It may be useful to create a checklist of points to bear in mind, and chief among them must be the one that was posed at the beginning: "does the design communicate the client's message?"

Go back to the brief to make sure that it meets all the agreed criteria. Anticipate the questions the client will ask. When you are asked why you selected a four-column format, don't say "because it looks nice". Give your reasons in a considered way: "Because the still-life product photographs shot in vertical format will fit un-cropped over two columns, extending to the depth of the type area, while the horizontal ones will fit to the three-column width and be an identical size, so that the products in both formats will be at a consistent scale, an important consideration in a jewellery catalogue."

Mistakes... I've made a few...

Having satisfied yourself that the layouts work, for print-based work the final consideration is the printing and finishing (folding, trimming, binding, blocking, stamping, laminating, varnishing and so on). It is impossible to anticipate every problem, but you should be able to avoid most of them if you consult your printer. Even top design groups can make expensive mistakes: the annual report for a major international company began to fall apart after reasonable handling. It was printed on a heavy, excellent quality, triple-coated (smooth), silk-finished stock, and it was perfect bound. The paper was so smooth that the glue could not hold the pages in. A better solution would have been to gather them into stitched sections and house them in a more substantial, square-backed binding.

Who shot the serif?

One of the most common problems is legibility of printed type. It will take the mis-register of only one of the four colours and by a minuscule amount to make a light serif 7pt type, reversed out white in a full-colour picture, virtually illegible. Printing white out of black only on a very absorbent stock can cause the ink to bleed, filling in the serifs and again affecting legibility

For web-based work the problems are less in number but equally important. You will always be aiming at a moving target. It is akin to preparing your print design for an A4 page only to find it being printed on A5 or A3. Your web page will have to display on various monitor sizes/screen resolutions, it may download slowly at 28KB or 10 times faster using a broadband connection. Do you go for the lowest common denominator and limit your creativity or do you assume your audience has the best kit? Always make your client aware of the implications of what you propose, normally a compromise between the extremes will be appropriate but where that line is drawn is very much dependent on the market that you are aiming at.

It aint what you do it's the way that you do it.

We have looked at the steps you can take to minimize failure and maximize success. Graphic design is not a science and it is only partly an art. There are no absolute principles to rely on, and do's and don'ts are always conditional.

The nature of the design process means that good designers are born and then made. The aesthetic predisposition of a designer is innate and the technical skills can be learned, but a willingness to understand the client's objectives and an interest in business generally does not always sit well with a designer's temperament, although fortunately the "far-out", arty image is a thing of the past. Design is a business-the communication business-and this is where our future lies.