Post Proofing Project Errors?

Just because #IWorkAtMichaels doesn't mean I have input to any of the projects you'll find on our website. While I do get advance access to our classroom projects, the instructions are already done and dusted by the time we get them.

That said, large companies such as Michaels and Wilton still move at the speed of print.

By that, I mean that product and project development cycles can run on the order of months or years, between identifying trends and their "stickiness" (projected life cycles), product design, prototyping, manufacturing tool-ups, packaging, marketing, and distribution. (When I was a teenaged member of the Girl Scouts' American Girl magazine's Editorial Advisory Board, we learned that the content of each issue was planned a year in advance, giving the editors time to line up experts, writers, and photographers, go through several rounds of copyediting and layout editing, getting the photography and graphics correct, and adding in reader contributions to fill the space to create the glossy magazine we looked forward to receiving in our mailboxes each month. View some of those vintage covers here.)

While electronic tools have sped up the writing and proofreading process to the point where many bloggers can post something daily, collaborative efforts that require research, beta testing, and/or technical copyediting still take time — and if you're publishing thousands of new pages (or updates) daily, some errors are bound to slip through.

When it comes to our in-store classes, I'll pre-read the Leader's Guide, figure if something's wrong or missing, and correct — even on-the-fly if we're missing one or more supplies, if a student wants to customize a project, or if an instruction step is missing. This is one of my strengths as an instructor.

Projects that originate on the website are another story. We only see them if we click through to the project. Today's email linked to a project whose supply list missed one of the necessary tools. I ended up using the customer service chat option to get the error submitted for correction.

All of us want our readers, students, and customers to be successful replicating the projects we post, and personalizing them for their own tastes and needs. The beauty of electronic publication means we can accept comments and error messages, and we can post-edit published pages to improve our users' success rates.