The last four hours

The part that decides whether you are rehired

Clients cannot judge your craft with any confidence. They can judge, immediately and permanently, whether the files you sent worked.

This is a strange fact about the trade and it is worth taking seriously. Studios rehire competent designers over brilliant ones because the competent one’s files never generate a phone call from a printer. Clients recommend the person whose handover was clean. The last four hours of a project have more effect on repeat work than the previous four weeks.

What a handover pack contains

Not “the final files”. A structured delivery, in a folder, that somebody who is not you can use in two years.

ClientName-ProjectName-2026-03/
  01-final/
    print/         PDF/X-1a or X-4, outlined, with bleed
    digital/       PNG, SVG, JPEG at stated sizes
    source/        the editable working files
  02-fonts/        licence notes, not the font files
  03-guidance/     one-page usage note, colour values
  04-archive/      packaged working files with links
  README.txt

The README is one page and answers the questions you will otherwise be emailed about: which file to send a printer, which to use on a website, what the colour values are, what the typefaces are and where to buy them, what the minimum size is, and what to do about the white version on a dark background.

Writing it takes twenty minutes and eliminates most of the post-project support that you are not being paid for.

Naming, which matters more than it should

Use a consistent scheme and never ship a file called final_v2_new_FINAL.ai.

A workable pattern: client-item-variant-size.ext, all lowercase, hyphens not spaces, dates as 2026-03-14 so they sort correctly.

raman-logo-horizontal-black.svg is findable in three years by somebody who was not there. Spaces and non-ASCII characters in filenames still cause genuine problems on web servers and on some print workflows, which is an unglamorous, entirely real reason to be careful.

The format questions, answered concretely

Print. Send a PDF made to a print standard: PDF/X-1a is the safest common denominator, PDF/X-4 if the printer supports transparency. Fonts embedded or outlined, images at 300 ppi at final size, bleed of 3mm or whatever the printer specified, CMYK or the specified spot colours. Ask the printer what they want; every print shop has a preference and they will tell you.

Logos. SVG for web, a layered vector source, and PNG at a few sizes with transparency. Provide the full-colour, single-colour black, and reversed-out white versions, because they will be needed within a month and the client will otherwise ask somebody else to make them badly.

Screen. Actual pixel dimensions the developer asked for, plus SVG for anything vector. Ask whether they want 1x and 2x, or whether their build handles it.

Video. A delivery master at the agreed codec and a compressed viewing copy. Say the frame rate, the resolution and the audio levels in the README.

Fonts: the trap that catches almost everyone

Do not send font files to a client. Most commercial font licences prohibit transferring the files, and doing so can expose both of you.

What you do instead:

• Outline the type in final print artwork, so the file does not need the font.
• Tell them what the typefaces are, where to buy them, and what licence they will need: desktop, web and app licences are separate purchases from most foundries, and a client who bought a desktop licence cannot legally use the webfont.
• Recommend an open alternative where it suits, and say so honestly. Google Fonts and the SIL Open Font Library contain good faces that can be installed, embedded and redistributed freely. For a small business that will never buy a foundry licence, specifying an open typeface from the start is better work than specifying one they will end up pirating.

This conversation belongs at the kickoff, not the handover, because the typeface decision has a cost attached and the client should know it before you build on it.

Packaging working files

Layout applications can gather a document with its linked images and fonts into one folder: “Package” in InDesign, “Collect for Output” in older tools, and the equivalent in Scribus. Do it, and check the result opens on a different machine.

The common failure is linked images that live in a folder on your drive. The client opens the file two years later, every image is missing, and you are no longer reachable. This happens constantly.

For anything you want to remain openable regardless of software, include a flattened PDF and a high-resolution image alongside the source. Application file formats rot; PDFs and TIFFs from twenty years ago still open.

What you hand over, and what you keep

The source files are usually part of the deal and should be stated in the quote either way. Where they are included, they are released on final payment and not before.

Keep your own archive of everything, indefinitely if you can. The client will lose their copy (not may, will) and being able to send it two years later is a five-minute favour that produces enormous goodwill and, quite often, the next project.

Delivering it

Send a link, not a 4GB email attachment. Any free cloud storage works. Two details: set the link not to expire if you can, and tell them to download and store a copy rather than relying on your link, because your storage account is not their archive.

Then send a short email that says what is in the folder and which file is the one they will need first. People open the folder, see thirty files and freeze. One sentence (“for the printer, send raman-menu-print.pdf”) prevents the phone call.

The limitation

Perfect files do not survive a client who reopens them in the wrong application, rescales the logo by dragging a corner without holding a modifier key, or sends the low-resolution web version to a printer. Some of this is preventable with a usage note and some is not.

What the handover controls is whether the failure is traceable to you. A packaged, documented, correctly specified delivery means that when something goes wrong downstream, you can point at what you sent, and, much more often, that nothing goes wrong at all and the printer quietly notes that your files are the ones that never bounce.