Production

Production is everything between the idea and the finished output: a poster at the printer, a video on a phone, a banner on a website, a presentation on the screen. In the previous lessons we dealt with what to say and to whom. Now we deal with how it will look, how much it will weigh, what paper it goes on, and who will make it. You can learn the rules in an hour; a feel for it takes years. But you’ll catch most mistakes with the rules alone.

The line between “I do marketing” and “I do production” has disappeared. By its own figures, Canva had more than 265 million monthly active users at the end of 2025 and annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $4 billion (TechCrunch). Most of them aren’t designers. The price of professional tools has fallen to near zero, and AI makes images in minutes. What hasn’t gotten cheaper is judgment: knowing that nobody can read 11 px text on an A2 poster, that red on a screen comes out of the printer brown, and that a 16:9 video on Reels looks like a postage stamp.

That’s why this lesson works on two levels: the craft, so you can make simple things yourselves, and the language you use to brief a designer, photographer, or printer and to tell whether they delivered good work. In the Brand chapter we looked at what holds an identity together. Production is where it either holds or falls apart.

Robin Williams (the designer, not the actor) boiled the basics of visual design down to four principles in The Non-Designer’s Design Book (1994), with the unflattering acronym CRAP: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity. Contrast: elements are either the same or clearly different; a heading two points bigger than the body text isn’t contrast, it’s a mistake. Repetition: colors, fonts, and spacing repeat so the reader can tell what is what. Alignment: every element has a visual connection to another; nothing just sits “somewhere.” Proximity: things that belong together sit together, with space between the groups.

Together they give you a hierarchy with three levels: one thing the reader sees in half a second (the name of the tournament), a second that makes them stop (the date, an image), and a third they read if they want to (details, a QR code, partners). When every element has the same weight, the eye has nowhere to go, and it leaves. The test: squint until the image blurs. Are three blobs left, in the right order? Then the hierarchy works. Is it a gray mush? Make one thing bigger and everything else smaller.

White space is the cheapest contrast tool there is. A beginner fills every centimeter because “they paid for it”; a professional leaves half of it empty so the other half can shout. A grid helps: invisible columns that everything aligns to; Canva and Figma both have one built in. When you don’t know what to add, take something away.

Readers perceive a typeface before they read a single word. The categories: serif (Times, Georgia; trust, long texts on paper), sans serif (Helvetica, Inter; screens, modern brands), slab serif (blocky serifs: Rockwell; strength, sport), monospace (every character the same width: IBM Plex Mono; code, tables), display (headings only), and script (handwriting style; a few words on an invitation). The same “Czech Championships” in Rockwell sounds like a sports hall, in Georgia like a gala evening, and in Comic Sans like a school cafeteria.

Two families, no more: one for headings (it can be striking), one for body text (readable at small sizes). They should differ clearly, never be “almost the same”; often a single family with several styles (Light, Regular, Bold, Condensed) is enough. Line length should be 45–90 characters including spaces (Butterick, Practical Typography); on a longer line, the eye gets lost on the way back. On the web, body text starts at 16 px. For a poster, work from the viewing distance: as a rough guide, one centimeter of letter height for every meter.

Licenses are a trap with fonts. As of October 2026, Google Fonts offers about 1,950 families, mostly under the SIL Open Font License: commercial use, modifications, and embedding in a website with no fee. You only have Adobe Fonts for as long as you subscribe to Creative Cloud. Type foundries (Monotype as well as independents) sell separate licenses for desktop, web, apps, or logos. A font from DaFont is often “free for personal use,” and a club poster with partners is already commercial use.

How much does type cost? Google Fonts is free. Adobe Fonts offers more than 30,000 fonts with a Creative Cloud subscription, and you may use the whole library for both personal and commercial work: in design including logos, on the web, in PDFs, and in video. With a type foundry, you buy a license based on how you’ll use the font. The Czech Storm Type Foundry lists the Andulka Sans family of 12 styles at CZK 6,647, roughly CZK 554 per style, and sells separate licenses for desktop, web, apps, e-books, digital ads, and logos. Prices are as of October 2026.

And Czech. Not every font has a complete Central European character set, and the quality of the diacritics varies: ď and ť should have a caron shaped like an apostrophe, ů a ring that doesn’t blur into an acute accent, and ě a caron that doesn’t collide with the letter. Type “Příliš žluťoučký kůň úpěl ďábelské ódy” into the preview and take a close look. On the web, serve only the styles you actually use, in woff2 format: according to HTTP Archive, the median home page carried 131 KB of fonts in 2024.

Color exists in three worlds. RGB is light: a screen mixes red, green, and blue, and together they make white; it’s written as HEX (#B3261E). CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, key = black) is print: four transparent inks on paper. The CMYK gamut, its range of colors, is smaller than a screen’s, so a vivid orange, a saturated blue, and a bright green go dull once printed. That’s why a designer converts to CMYK before printing and asks for a proof, and that’s why the red from your phone came out of the printer brown.

Pantone is a numbered swatch book of spot colors that the printer mixes ready-made instead of building them from four inks. Thanks to it, a company has the same red on its business cards, trucks, and jerseys. But it’s a licensed product: in 2022, the Pantone libraries disappeared from Photoshop and Illustrator, and colors in older files showed up as black until the user paid about $15 a month for Pantone Connect. So a brand manual should list three values: HEX for the web, CMYK for print, and Pantone where the exact shade matters.

The other half is readability. WCAG 2.2, the web accessibility standard, requires a contrast ratio against the background of at least 4.5:1 for normal text (level AA), 3:1 for large text (18 points and up, or 14 if bold), and 7:1 at level AAA. You can measure it for free in the WebAIM Contrast Checker. Light gray text on white, a popular “elegant” effect, often doesn’t even reach 3:1. A projector is dimmer than a monitor, so the contrast on the big screen is even worse.

According to the U.S. National Eye Institute, about 1 in 12 men has a color vision deficiency, and according to Colour Blind Awareness about 1 in 200 women; most often, red and green blur together. In a hall with 300 men, that’s 25 people. So color never carries information on its own; it always comes with text, a shape, or an icon. For a palette, the 60-30-10 rule is enough: 60% base, 30% secondary, 10% accent. The Coolors generator helps, but the brand manual decides.

Every format has a role. JPEG is for photos: lossy compression, no transparency. PNG is for graphics with transparency and sharp edges (a logo, a screenshot); for photos, it’s unnecessarily large. SVG is vector: logos, icons, charts, scalable without loss, and small. WebP and AVIF are web formats: according to a Google study, WebP is 25–34% smaller than JPEG at the same quality. The rule: photos for the web in WebP, logos in SVG, PDF or TIFF for print, PNG for presentations.

According to HTTP Archive, the median desktop page weighed 2,652 KB in 2024, and 2,311 KB on mobile. Images are the biggest item: a home page with images carries a median of 1,054 KB of them, more than JavaScript. On mobile, that means waiting and people leaving (the Internet chapter). A photo from a phone is 4 to 8 MB and 4,000 px wide; for the web, 1,600 px and 150 to 300 KB is enough. Squoosh does it for free, right in your browser.

Screens work in pixels, print in dots per inch (dpi). Quality print assumes 300 dpi at print size: A4 needs about 2,480 × 3,508 px. An image from the web (1,200 px) on an A2 poster has about 70 dpi and breaks up into little squares; you can always scale down, never up. Banners and roll-ups are fine at 100 to 150 dpi, since people look at them from meters away. Never use a screenshot of a logo: ask for SVG, PDF, or EPS.

A photo is a copyrighted work, even one from a phone and even one “from Google.” You can use libraries like Pexels and Unsplash commercially and for free; Pexels doesn’t require attribution, but it prohibits, for example, selling unaltered copies or giving the impression that a person in the photo endorses you. Paid stock libraries (Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, Getty) sell royalty-free licenses (you pay once and use it repeatedly) or rights-managed ones (priced by use, print run, and territory). With a commissioned photographer, the license is in the contract (see the Suppliers section). You may publish a person’s likeness only with their consent (Section 85 of the Czech Civil Code), with exceptions for news reporting: an athlete on the podium, yes; a close-up of a spectator in the stands, better not.

How much does a stock license cost? Adobe Stock charges €29.99 a month in the Czech Republic, with an annual commitment, for 10 credits: that’s ten images, or at most one video. Without a subscription, you can buy a pack of 40 credits for €269.99, which covers 40 standard images or just five HD videos, so an image comes to about €6.75 and a video to €54. The standard license is perpetual. But a print run with the image may not exceed 500,000 copies, though this limit doesn’t apply on the web and social media, and the image may not appear on merchandise you sell, such as a mug; that requires an extended license. Envato takes the opposite approach: from €14.50 a month, you download unlimited photos, videos, music, and fonts, but each download licenses one specific project. If you cancel, finished projects stay covered, but you may not use downloaded items in new ones. Prices are as of October 2026.

Today, video is made for the device. 16:9 (1920 × 1080) is TV, YouTube, projectors, and the web. 9:16 (1080 × 1920) is a phone held upright: Reels, TikTok, Shorts, stories. 4:5 (1080 × 1350) takes up the most space in the Instagram and LinkedIn feeds, and 1:1 works everywhere, but only so-so. For ads, TikTok recommends 9:16 with a minimum of 540 × 960 px; YouTube Shorts are vertical videos up to 3 minutes long. Platforms cover part of the frame with the post text and buttons, which is why there are safe zones: keep text in the middle part and leave roughly the bottom fifth of the height clear.

Shoot once and cut for several formats. Shoot 16:9, ideally in 4K, with the main subject in the center; from 4K you can crop 9:16 and 4:5 in full 1080p. An interview for Reels can be shot vertically from the start; a panel discussion can’t. The frame rate in Europe is 25 fps (50 for sport), because the power grid runs at 50 Hz and the lights in a sports hall flicker at 30 fps; YouTube wants you to upload at the frame rate you shot in. 4K gives you headroom for cropping and for LED walls at events. You can also borrow a format from another field: the drone fly-through of the HOPI warehouses was modeled on a video by an NFL club; the story is in the Trends chapter.

Bitrate is the amount of data per second, and it matters more for file size than resolution does. For SDR at 24–30 fps, YouTube recommends: 720p at 5 Mbps, 1080p at 8 Mbps, 4K at 35 to 45 Mbps; at 50–60 fps, roughly half as much again. A minute of 1080p at 8 Mbps is 60 MB. Export MP4 with the H.264 codec and AAC audio: it plays everywhere, from projectors to Teams. H.265 (HEVC) gives you roughly half the file size, but it doesn’t play everywhere; AV1 is royalty-free, and both YouTube and Netflix stream in it.

And sound, or rather the lack of it. In February 2016, Facebook said that when a video in the mobile feed unexpectedly starts playing with sound, 80% of people react negatively, and that in its internal tests captions extended average viewing time by 12%. The numbers are ten years old, but the conclusion still holds: video for social media has captions, the first three seconds work without sound, and the punchline doesn’t wait until the end. Live broadcasting and the signal chain are covered in the Streaming chapter.

The price of tools has dropped to zero. Photopea, Photoshop in the browser including layers and PSD files, was written single-handedly by Ivan Kutskir, who runs it from Prague; it’s free, with ads. Since October 2025, Canva has made Affinity (vector, photo, and layout in one app) free for individuals. DaVinci Resolve, an editing and color grading suite that even Hollywood films are cut in, is free; the paid Studio version costs a one-time $295. Add to that CapCut (editing on your phone, with captions), Squoosh (compression), Snapseed (photo editing on your phone), and Canva Free.

The paid tier is cheap if you need it. Canva Pro costs CZK 2,400 a year in the Czech Republic and adds a brand kit (colors, fonts, logos for the team) and background removal. Adobe Express Premium costs €12.09 a month in the Czech Republic and gives you access to Adobe Fonts. Figma Professional costs $16 per editor per month billed annually ($20 billed monthly), and viewing is free; it’s the standard for designing websites and apps. Adobe Creative Cloud Pro with all the apps costs €79.30 a month (€44.39 the first year for new customers), and Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, or InDesign on its own costs €26.43 a month.

Students get some tools for free or cheaper; they just need to verify their student status. Figma and FigJam are free for students, educators, and schools, on the Professional tier. Envato gives students 31% off the Core plan, and the Czech foundry Storm Type gives them half off its fonts, but only for nonprofit projects; anyone who wants to keep using a font after school has to upgrade to the standard license. Before you subscribe to anything, find out what you’re entitled to through your school. Prices are as of October 2026.

Don’t choose “the best tool,” choose the best tool for the output and for whoever carries on after you: a colleague can edit a Canva template without you; an open InDesign file, not so much. Mix tools without thinking and you’ll end up with a logo in three versions and a presentation nobody else can open. And the most expensive item in production isn’t licenses, it’s time: templates and automation save it, not expensive software.

Paper sizes are set by the ISO 216 standard. A0 has an area of exactly 1 m² (841 × 1,189 mm), and each next size is made by halving the longer side: A2 is 420 × 594 (a noticeboard poster), A4 is 210 × 297, A5 is 148 × 210 (a flyer). The aspect ratio is always 1 : √2, which is why A4 scales down to A5 without changing shape. The B series is larger and used for posters: B1, at 707 × 1,000 mm, is the standard “pillar poster.” That’s also where paper weight comes from: g/m² is the weight of one A0 sheet. Office paper is 80 gsm, a flyer 135 to 170 gsm, a business card 300 to 350 gsm.

Three words a printer will always use. Bleed is color or an image extending past the edge of the format, usually 3 mm on each side; the cutter has a tolerance, and without bleed you get a white strip. Crop marks show where to cut. The safe zone is 3 to 5 mm in from the trim, where you don’t put text or logos. You export PDF/X-1a or PDF/X-4 (print standards with embedded fonts and colors) in CMYK, with images at 300 dpi. Canva, Affinity, and InDesign all have a “bleed and crop marks” option when exporting: turn it on.

The technology depends on the print run. Offset transfers ink from metal plates; making the plates costs the same for 100 copies as for 10,000, so from a few hundred copies up it’s the cheapest per copy, and it can do Pantone spot colors and varnishing. Digital printing is basically a big laser printer: no setup, from a single copy, right away, and every copy can be different (names on certificates). As a rough guide: 20 A2 posters means digital, 2,000 A5 flyers means offset, and for around 200 copies, get quotes for both. Large format (a banner, an 85 × 200 cm roll-up) is printed on a plotter, and 100 to 150 dpi is enough.

Paper and finish shape the impression: gloss coated paper gives rich photos but reflects light, matte is elegant and readable, and lamination protects covers and business cards. Before a large print run, ask for a proof or a single copy: 2,000 flyers with a typo in the date can’t be sent back. Ask the printer for a quote with a finished spec, following the list below; color is written as 4/4 (CMYK on both sides) or 4/0 (one side). Without a spec, you’ll get a price that changes once you deliver the files.

How much does it cost? In October 2026, the online printer eprinting.cz listed A5 flyers on 130 gsm gloss coated paper, full color on both sides, at CZK 1,046 for 100 copies and CZK 1,565 for 1,000 copies, both excluding VAT and with free shipping. Ten times as many flyers cost only half as much again: one flyer comes to CZK 10.46 at 100 copies, CZK 1.57 at 1,000, and CZK 0.45 at 10,000 (chart below). But a flyer is cheap only if you actually hand it out. Price lists also differ: a similar flyer on 135 gsm matte coated paper costs CZK 2,430 for 1,000 copies excluding VAT in the indicative price list of the Prague print shop Carter, so it pays to get quotes from two or three printers.

In the same calculator, 100 A2 posters on 130 gsm gloss coated paper, printed on one side, cost CZK 2,641, or CZK 26 apiece. Single-sided business cards on 350 gsm matte coated paper come to CZK 588 for 100 and CZK 938 for 1,000. print.cz sells an 85 × 200 cm roll-up with printing and a bag for CZK 950 in its cheapest version and for CZK 1,650 in its premium version, with a stabilizer and a padded bag. All prices exclude 21% VAT.

What you can’t do or don’t have time for, you buy: photo, video (crew, editing, animation), graphic design and layout, print, event production (tech, staging, catering), web, translation and proofreading. For each category, keep two or three trusted contacts in a supplier directory: name, what they can do, price, last job, and how it went. One contact is a risk: the photographer gets sick and the tournament doesn’t move.

A supplier is only as good as the brief they get. It’s the Target → Audience → Message → Channel → Form → Result sequence from the Internet chapter, written on one page for someone from outside (checklist below). What’s missing most often is where and for how long the output will be used: both the license and the price depend on it.

In the Czech Republic, budgets run roughly like this (a rough estimate, not a price list; check by asking for quotes): a photographer for a half-day to full-day event, from a few thousand to the low tens of thousands of CZK; a video crew, tens of thousands of CZK per shooting day; a freelance designer, hundreds to low thousands of CZK per hour; 500 A5 flyers, the low thousands of CZK. Prices go up with the name, the season, and the rush. Ask for a breakdown: what’s included, what counts as extra work, how many rounds of revisions, and who pays for travel and for licenses to music or stock photos.

For freelancers, there is data too. In the Na volné noze survey from 2024, 421 people in design and multimedia responded: graphic designers, designers, illustrators, photographers, and camera operators. A third of them charge CZK 600 to CZK 999 an hour excluding VAT, a quarter CZK 1,000 to CZK 1,999, and only 3% more than CZK 2,000, while across all fields it’s just under 10%. But an hourly rate doesn’t tell you how many hours a job will take; only the breakdown shows that.

The license is the most often overlooked thing. Under the Czech Copyright Act, photos, video, graphics, and text are copyrighted works, and the author remains the author even after you pay them. What you buy is a license, the right to use the work. Unless agreed otherwise, Section 61 applies: the client who commissioned the work may use it for the purpose arising from the contract; anything beyond that (photos for a sponsor, paid advertising, resale) needs an additional license. A work created by an employee as part of their job is an employee work (Section 58), and the employer exercises the rights. An exclusive license must be in writing (Civil Code, Section 2358(2)). Photos of people also need the consent of the people pictured (Section 85 of the Civil Code); for athletes, this is handled by the event rules or the entry form.

Music is licensed separately. Music in a video and music played to people at an event are two different uses. For video, you buy it by subscription: Epidemic Sound charges nothing extra for publishing or monetizing a video, but it allows its music in paid ads only on the Pro and Enterprise plans, and it points public institutions, universities, and nonprofits to Enterprise. Envato and Adobe Stock also include music in their subscriptions. Music from speakers or a live band at an event is public performance, and the organizer gets the license from OSA, the Czech collecting society for music authors. Under the joint 2026 tariff, music from speakers as an accompaniment to a sports event costs CZK 7.25 per spectator excluding VAT for OSA, Intergram, and OAZA combined, so a tournament with 300 spectators pays CZK 2,175. When the music is an essential part of the program, as at dance competitions or aerobics, it’s CZK 19.44 per spectator. For live music, send the request at least five days before the event along with the set list; otherwise OSA charges a rate 15% higher.

Most production mistakes happen between the steps, not within them. The basic sequence: brief → concept (a sketch, a mood in images, the so-called moodboard) → v1 → proofreading (text, numbers, names, logos) → v2 → approval → export for each channel → archive. Each step is signed off by one person; “everyone approved it” means nobody read it. Programmers have branches, versions, and test environments (see Internet); graphic design and video mostly don’t, which is why the file “poster_final_FINAL2_fix.pdf” exists.

File names are the cheapest document management there is. A good name tells you what the file is without opening it: 2026-11-08_tournament-prague_poster_A2_v3.pdf, that is, date, project, output, format, version. A date in year-month-day form sorts files on its own. The word “final” is banned; the version gets a number. Archive the source files next to the exports, or a year from now you won’t be able to change even a phone number. Larger teams have a digital asset management system (DAM: Bynder, Brandfolder); smaller ones are fine with a shared drive with a fixed structure and a brand manual.

Before delivery comes the preflight, a checklist you always read in full, even if “it’s just a story” (list below). Five minutes of checking costs less than a reprint, or a deleted post that already has two hundred comments about the wrong date.

AI has entered production in three places. Generating from text: Midjourney (version V8 from 2026), Higgsfield, Adobe Firefly, and GPT Image make an illustration, a background, or a mockup in minutes; Veo, Sora, Kling, and Seedance do the same with video lasting seconds. Editing: background removal, generative fill, extending a shot from 1:1 to 16:9, upscaling a small photo. Sound and voice: reading text aloud with a synthetic voice (ElevenLabs, OpenAI), background music, cleaning up recordings. Models and prices in more detail in the Artificial Intelligence chapter.

The weak spots are still the same: hands, text in the image, logos and specific products, faces of real people, and consistency of a character or style across a series. Newer models are improving (GPT Image and Midjourney V8 can handle text), but checking remains manual. The rule for marketing: AI for illustrations, backgrounds, variants, and concepts; never for a photo “from an event” that never happened, an athlete’s face without consent, or a partner’s logo. You only lose trust once.

The rules have caught up with practice. From August 2, 2026, Article 50 of the AI Act requires anyone who publishes a deepfake (an image, audio, or video that realistically resembles a real person, place, or event) to disclose that the content is artificial; for clearly artistic and satirical works, a notice that doesn’t spoil the work is enough. Providers of generators must label outputs in a machine-readable way; those on the market before August 2, 2026 have until December 2, 2026 under the Digital Omnibus amendment (Art. 111). You don’t have to label an ordinary illustration or background, but it’s good manners. And authorship: the Copyright Act protects a work that is “a unique result of the author’s creative activity” (Section 2), and the author is a natural person (Section 5). Output from a prompt alone therefore most likely has no author; the more of your own work goes into it, the closer it gets to being a work.

Services have their own terms. Midjourney allows commercial use on paid plans (from $10 a month), but a company with gross revenue over a million dollars a year must have the Pro ($60) or Mega ($120) plan. Read the terms before the campaign, not after. But the most expensive part isn’t the subscription; it’s the time spent selecting and checking: usually one variant out of many is usable, and even that one needs cropping, colors matched to the manual, and text added by hand. AI is an excellent assistant and a lousy art director.

Production is a craft with rules that fit on one page (list below). AI speeds up illustrations, captions, proofreading, and variants; it won’t answer for the hierarchy, the truth, or what you published. This closes the whole course: marketing starts with the question of who and why, the brand holds the identity, advertising, social media, and events carry it to people, and production gives it shape, weight in kilobytes, and paper weight in g/m².