Sorry. Was this the eyeball cover? If so, how did the printing turn out?

I'm not sure I really understand what happened or what is wrong. Can you show a pic? Don't feel too bad. We all have our hard lessons. Last year, I designed a poster for a music event that I named, designed an identity for, handled the printing for, the whole nine yards. I forgot to put that the event started at 7 pm. The end client ended up stamping it on all of them in the worst of places. I could have died. In my defense, they never gave me the time - thats why it never got put on there. Oh well....It wasn't a costly blunder, but it did prove my humanity!

Once while working prepress in the days of light tables, waxers and negatives, I mistakenly covered up a portion of the header on a letterhead with rubylith and the dumbass pressman ran all 10,000 without checking anything. Man the boss was not happy.

I work in wide format.
Any mistake is expensive.

Not centering a piece in my final layout. 20k pieces 3 spot colors, and it
was just far enough off so that it couldn't be fixed on the cutter. So dumb.
Cmmd + Shift + M in Quark takes 1/4 second. Rerunning the job took a lot
longer.

I've learnt to double check the information on the business cards BEFORE you get 500 printed and hand them over to the client. (in my defense I have a suspicion my boss gave me the wrong phone number in the first place but he would never admit to it.)

yeah it was the eyeball cover :-( basically the opening of the sleeve should have been at the top with a sticker folding over the opening from front to back 'sealing' the record in (meaning you have to slit the sticker to open it).

As i layed everything out onto a template running landscape as im used to - spine in the middle front and back cover either side - the job came back with the sticker in place folding over the top edge which was a glueflap! The opening to the sleeve was of course to the right.



Gutted!

Ain't that the truth.

It looks nice though, if that's any consolation.

2000 boxes custom die cut the wrong size by an 8th of an inch, which made it just to big to fit into a bigger box it needed to go into. Not to mention the 2000 custom labels that were hand adhered on to said boxes. In the end the box guys admitted it was partly there fault and said they would cover the reboxing but not the reprinting, we scowered the printing and found that the printers had cut the labels to the wrong size so they ate the reprinting.

I felt sick to my stomach for a week straight, just reading this thread is starting to make me queazy. I feel for you man.

It does look great at least.

My god I'm pleased I work on the web. Any mistake can be corrected pretty easily

I've primarily been a web guy, and reading these stories kinda makes me glad! I'm already paranoid enough about making a mistake, I can't imagine having thousands of copies of something printed with a mistake.

However, I'm working on an instructional CD that is about to have 200,000 copies made, so I reeeally hope I don't return to this thread with a horror story of my own.

We recently had a client who was super rushed, and I designed a self mailing invitation for them that started at 7" wide by 15" long (vertical) and folded down to 7" x 5" (horizontal). Because there was virtually no time, I emailed the files to the printer - no time to send a hard proof. Because the printer just upgraded to Quark 7, they're still working out the bugs - and Quark kept giving them extra color plates (just a 3 pantone color job, but they kept getting extra process plates for no apparent reason - I had to create pdf separations for them), so that made the job even more of a crunch for them. When all is said and done, they get the job printed and they ship it to the client - on time! Yay! Until the client opened one of the invitations and realized that the inside had been printed upside down. I know we still should have sent a hard proof, or at least we could have been clearer about how everything was oriented, but I'd like to think that no matter how much of a rush a job is that someone at the press could take 10 seconds to think about how this invitation would open up and realize that the second page would need to be flipped. No harm done, the client was in such a rush, he mailed out the invitations anyway.

Been there...

The project was a 12 month calendar and right before printing I checked everything as best as I could. I didn't find any mistakes and sent PDF files to my client to ask for his approval before sending out the HI-RES files for production (this particular client always wants to check and sign every job before it goes to their printer).

He said he didn't have the time to check it so he delegated the task to his assistant, and she claimed the calendar was error-free as well.

1500 pieces were printed and then she decided to re-check every little detail. Guess what? March had some mistakes (holidays on the wrong day). To my defense, I had been staring at the damn thing for over a month and all I could see was numbers everywhere. However I do not deny I made a mistake by not re-re-checking before delivering the HI-RES files.

The client wanted me to pay for a new run of 1500 pieces. I did not agree and we ended the commercial relationship.

Expensive mistake indeed.

If you're walking along and notice that your shoe is untied, never lean on the first bike in a long line of Harley's parked outside the tatoo parlour.