Graphic Files & Factory Production Standards

The client-facing designer in the factory's central department - took dozens of international brands to production, wrote the standard that made it repeatable, and prototyped AR and CMS to digitize the floor years early.

A ski, snowboard and kiteboard factory of over a hundred people lives on its graphics, and the construction office is where that lives or dies - the central department every board passes through. That was my desk for four or five years. Artwork came in from board and kite brands across the world - names the industry knows: Faction, Dupraz, Majesty and ZAG in skis and snowboards, Wed'ze (Decathlon), Flysurfer, Shinn and Spleene in kiteboarding, plus Contract, Endeavor, Goldenboard, Powder Equipment, Pathron, Raven, White Dot, Blackhole and more. My job was to take each one from a brief to a file the floor could actually build, coordinating across silk-screen, technology, logistics and sales, and drawing up the production plans the factory ran on. Different client, different board, different problem every week.

The incoming work was inconsistent, and inconsistency on a factory floor means scrapped boards - so I fixed the root cause. On my own initiative I wrote and designed the factory's Graphics Technical Specifications: a complete standard teaching any designer, B2B or B2C, how to prepare a production-ready file - the 1:1 workspace per mould, the layer order, the silk-screen print order F1 to F7, bleeds, trapping. I rebuilt every template in Illustrator, cut file-prep effort by roughly half, and developed the technology cards - the specs the floor builds from - to a level of detail the factory hadn't had.

Then I tried to reform the whole information flow. There was too much paper in circulation, so I built interactive PDFs and a dedicated CMS, ran lean-management improvements on the process (scrum, kanban, iterative delivery), and even prototyped using augmented reality to read the technology cards straight off a phone - a decade before that was a normal idea. The company's lean specialist told me I'd missed my calling. This was my favourite job, and it is the direct ancestor of everything I build now: serve the client, write the rules down, digitize the repetition, cut the errors to zero. The same discipline, long before AI. The factory rides on today as Horizon Sport, and Nobile boards still sell worldwide.