PageProof webinar – The future of online proofing

Hi everybody, it's Marcus from PageProof here today going through a webinar about the future of online proofing. So what we're going to go through today is a few slides just going through some of the history of online proofing and, well, history of proofing really, and then we'll take a look at some features that we've got available on the platform, PageProof, and then we'll take a look, a little peek into the future of what we are looking at. So Let's get started. There's nothing like getting straight into the webinar. So I'm Markus. I'm CTO and co-founder of PageProof, and I've spent a lot of time proofing in my life. And that has led to obviously the creation of PageProof with my co-founder Gemma. And we have built a platform which a lot of companies all around the world use to gather feedback on work, a lot of creative work, documents, presentations, video, websites. But what I'd like to just go through is, you know, before we look forward at the future of online proofing, let's have a look at where we've come from, because I think a lot of us have got, you know, we've worked in this industry a long time, and, you know, we know what we used to do, and for those that are new to the industry, it's like, well, what's the big deal? What did you do previously? So let's sort of go back in time and have a look at some of the things that we used to do when it came to proofing. So the timeline roughly looks like this. So, you know, I'm not going to go back to the pre-computer days, but, you know, I'll go back to maybe the '90s. And in those days, it was extremely common to print out your work, in some cases roll it up into a sleeve, pop it into a tube, and then order a bicycle courier who would take that printout across town to your client or to someone to take a look at. They would unroll it, get their red pen, and they would draw all over the proof, roll it back up, send it on to the next person, or they'd send it on back to you so you could make the changes. And the way in which we tracked workflow was there was a little sticker on the front that had the names of the people, and they would check a checkbox to say, I've looked at it. and then see who the next person was and send it on to that person. So that was circulating printouts. And I think a lot of companies still do this today. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just a way in which it's done, especially if everybody is working in the same building. You can literally print out your work, go and show somebody, hey, this is the closest representation to the printout work that we're going to do. and get markups and things that way. Then we kind of moved into the late '90s and 2000s where PDF became, you know, something that we could actually use for printing and prepress. So the most common thing that we see these days, and it's still very, very common, is attaching a PDF to an email and then sending that email blast out to multiple people who will then use Acrobat Reader or Acrobat Pro or Apple Preview, or I don't know what. They'll put markup of some sort on that PDF and then email it back to you. Now, as a creative, you have now got all sorts of things coming into your inbox. You've got a whole lot of email trails of, okay, this person said this, this person said this. Oh no, it conflicts. Get on the phone, email them back, figure out which is which, and you spend most of your time herding cats, as we like to say. You're chasing around trying to get all this feedback, and there've been some slight improvements on that, but not necessarily the greatest. You know, things like Share for Review, which is a little bit of improvement on attaching a PDF to an email, but it really doesn't solve it. So then number 3 kicks in, which is online proofing. So a little bit of history here. PageProof was one of the first online proofing tools on the planet. So in 1999, PageProof was a product inside of another company, and we produced essentially this tool for, for a large supermarket chain to put simple dots on a piece of mailer work. And that was the very first time PageProof was used, is in 1999. In 2005, we added video review. And then in 2013, we relaunched with the new PageProof for the world to see, and we haven't looked back since. So online proofing, as we know, you file in one place, invite multiple people onto that, onto that location, and you're all commenting and leaving feedback on the same piece of work and getting a set of changes back to your design team. So online proofing is where the majority of people sit today. Now, looking forward, there is this talk about, you know, agentic proofing. Well, what's agentic proofing? Well, agentic proofing is where you actually have AI help you leave feedback on work, and there are agentic workflows which we can talk about in this presentation. But these are the stages which we're seeing in the whole online proofing world. So we talk about taking a piece of work from draft to perfection. And how do we do that today? And the method, no matter what you do, whether you do, you know, printouts or you do PDFs or you do online proofing, the whole idea is that you involve multiple reviewers on your proof. So the proofs go to multiple people to get their opinions, to get their feedback. Maybe they have some domain expertise that you want. So you use the tools to actually get to these multiple reviewers. It then goes through multiple rounds of gathering feedback and you end up with multiple versions until you get the perfect piece of work that you're looking for. So, you know, these 3 elements here are generally where you end up when you try to take something from a draft to perfection. This is the sort of thing that you have multiple people involved, multiple rounds, and multiple versions of your proof. How do you improve where you are sitting today. So if you're sitting in a situation where, you know, you're printing out work and/or you're emailing PDFs around or you're using something like Adobe Share for review and you're like, okay, how do we take the next step and get an efficient process in place? Super simple. You move to online proofing, of which, of course, PageProof offers a solution for that. And if you're sitting inside online proofing and you're using online proofing to do a lot of your work, you know, where do you get some efficiency and improvements beyond what you're doing today. And that's what we're going to talk about in this webinar. So if you are using printouts and emails, you can move to online proofing. If you are looking and you're sitting in online proofing, it's like, well, could we take a look at some of the things that agentic proofing brings? And we'll talk about this bottom one today. So we're not going to do demos of PageProof today. We're going to take a look at some of the other technology as we look forward. One of the things I wanted to introduce was the concept of a PageProof intelligent agent, which we call a PAI agent. We take the P and the I, put them together, so we end up with the PAI part of the equation. That's why you see this PAI icon in your PageProof these days. It's custom intelligence for your team. Now, the whole idea of an agent is that a PageProof intelligent agent can do things for you. And you can train an agent essentially to look at your rules. You know, you can put your context in there. You can have multiple agents doing different things. And it's a matter of actually just adding a tag to your proof, and that will invoke that agent to come in and do some work on your proof. It's as simple as that. So this is what an agent is. It's a way of embodying all your rules into into an entity, if you like, an AI entity that will go through and do some checks on your work. So it's a pretty, pretty big step for a lot of people to how do we go from, you know, doing the review the way we've been doing it to involving a PI Agent to come in and do some work for us. So let's have a little bit of a deep dive into what this looks like. PI Agents, I think a lot of people say, well, you know, what can it actually do for me? Well, You know, you could, you have some rules in your business or in your design process or whatever it is around brand consistency. So you're like, well, you know, every piece of work that leaves this studio or leaves this department must have this tone, must have these colors in there. We can't deviate from the fonts, you know, all those brands, the logo positioning, you know, which logo sits on which background. Is it a white logo with a colored logo, you want all those rules that you have in brand, they can be all built into a PAI agent and it can check things to do with brand consistency for you. So you're not having to get people to do it. It will do that work. Language and terminology. What we mean by language is the way in which you speak about things, but it can also be different language translations as well. So if you do want a PAI agent to check the translations of your work into Italian, or look, you've got a German translation, but you really don't know how to check it. Well, you can have the PI Agent do that for you as well. So it speaks about 120 different languages if you wanted to. So that's from a translation point of view, but there's also ways in which your brand speaks. You know, some brands will say, hey, look, we don't say these words, but we always refer to the product in this way. So these are some of the things you can put in there. The one I'm going to look at today is going to be mainly around packaging. So you can do things like, you know, We must have, you know, whenever we talk about alcohol in a, you know, in an alcoholic beverage, we must show these warnings and we must have this and we must have that. So these are rules around packaging that you can put in and I can show you an agent that will sort of pull those things out for you. And then finally, and not just the only thing, but, you know, one that we've got on the screen here obviously is legal and compliance requirements. So, you know, we must have the terms and conditions. They must say at least these statements. Etc., etc. Those can all be built into your agent as well. So it can do a lot of checks for your work. So an example of what I wanted to talk about is I have an example agent which I've created, and generally these are the things that the agent is going to check. And I've called it PyPackaging, and it's going to go through and, you know, check the ingredients list on my work. The nutritional information has, you know, the correct units on it. If we show alcohol, then make sure you don't use abbreviations, barcodes, QR codes, and we don't want any photography on our packaging. So these are the sorts of things that you can build into an agent, and it can do those checks for you. So we'll take a look at what the results are of running this agent on a piece of work and how it can really help your team with getting to that perfection that we talked about. So how do we go from draft to infection in the fastest possible way. Well, using an agent can really help with that, with the speed of doing that, but also the accuracy of doing that as well. So we'll have a look at how this PI agent actually behaves. So let's jump in and take a look at the PI agent in action. So jump over to my browser now. And very simply, a way that you put an agent into your workflow is obviously work with our team to actually define that agent, get that all set up. And once you've got it in place, then you can, when you upload your work into PageProof, so I'm going to take a piece of work here and drop it into PageProof. It's just a matter of going through down the bottom here. You'll see Pi Insights on your proof setup screen. So all you do is switch on Pi Insights and then switch on, hey, I would love to have the comments on that. And then all you need up in the tags is the name of the agent. So you just put the name of the agent in there, and then that agent is now activated to go and do a check on all of your work. Okay, so that's as simple as it needs to be to actually go through and do the checks on your work. So what is it going to do if I upload this proof? So I choose my workflow. and then we go through and upload that proof, what are we going to get? So I'll send that out. That's going to upload the proof into the platform. And then we're going to take a look at exactly what that looks like from an Agentic point of view. So here we have a proof which has been marked up by the Pi Agent. So this is before any reviewers have taken a look at the work. You'll notice over on the right-hand side, there are a number of comments. So I've opened the proof for the very first time and there's already markup and comments on this proof. So if I open this up, you can see that these comments have been placed by PageProof Intelligence. It's already gone through and put these comments on my work. So there's a very obvious spelling mistake right here. So if I click into that, you can see refreshing is not spelled correctly. There's some things here about barcodes. Dietary fiber is spelled incorrectly in the list here for a different zone that we might be working in. It's even detected that there is a space missing between green pear. You know, it's detected all that. Then we get into, you know, how does— how do we— how are we supposed to show, you know, milligrams, milliliters, those sorts of things on our packaging? And this one here, I really wanted to highlight. It's seen that we have talked about, you know, 5.5% ABV. And it should be a clear statement saying, you know, alcohol 5.5% by volume. So it's a really, really— this comment that's being placed here is following the rules that we set in the agent, and it's highlighting these things for us, which is really, really, really great. So it's going through and actually doing things which are highlighted for us before our team gets started. So this is what a Pi Agent can do for you when it comes to your proofing process. So this is a simple addition that you can do. You can talk to the PageProof customer success team. They can talk to you about the plan level that you need to be on and how we set agents up to get up and running. But the benefits of this are massive. So that is how a Pi Agent can help you today. It also gives you a summary, by the way. So you see this little Pi icon at the bottom of the screen on the proofing screen. If you click into this, it actually gives you this panel with more detail in it. Really, really great here, including that inconsistency in the spelling for the word fiber. So there we have the Pi Agent working inside online proofing and doing a really great job at picking out the work. So I really wanted to just have a talk now about pre-proof. We announced pre-proof back at the Creative Pro Week. Shout out to David Blatner and team. You know, we were there at CreativePro Week and we did a presentation on pre-proof and we said, look, pre-proof is coming and it lets you run your agents inside your design tool before you make a proof. So of course, I'll let that sink in. So we're all used to sending our work out and getting feedback from our team, but what if we could have the agent check our work inside InDesign before we send it. Wouldn't that be better? Wouldn't that be great? You could just check your work before you send it out to your reviewers, and they get a far better experience of just a few little things they want rather than some, some obvious things which the agent would be able to catch for you. So what we've done is built pre-proof And it's going into all the design tools. And it means that you can use the agents that you have created and using inside PageProof today, you can use that exact same agent inside PreProof before you create your proof. So one agent now is being used in multiple places for doing more and more work for you. Really, really, really powerful and really useful. So it's out today for Adobe InDesign, and I'm going to show you a quick demo of PreProof for Adobe InDesign, but it's coming soon to Illustrator. And little sneak peek, I'm actually going to show you the Illustrator plugin today. So I have a pre-release version and I'm going to show you to prove to you it's coming. So Illustrator is up next. Photoshop will follow very quickly. Microsoft Office is imminent. So we'll have PowerPoint, Word, and Excel. So I think Word and PowerPoint are the most obvious choices there. But you have agents to run over your PowerPoint presentations, checking branding consistency. Figma and Canva and more are all coming soon. So pre-proof for your design tools, super useful. Here I am inside of InDesign, and many of you are probably aware of the PageProof plugin. We already have the PageProof plugin out in the world, and what we've done with this new release is we've added some sparkles down here. So this is PageProof Intelligence pre-proof, little icon at the bottom of the panel. You click onto it and it opens up the preproof panel. So here we have the preproof panel, and this lets you check your document before you send out your proof. Now, what it does is as you have new documents, they'll show up. So if I come up here and say new document and we add that in, we'll now get another document inside this panel. I can then choose the agent. That I want to use. I want to use the legal agent or whatever agents you have defined in your PageProof account show up in a menu inside here. So you very simply just grab hold of the agent that you want and then you click review and it does a review of your work. So if we go back to looking at that packaging file, if I click onto view insights, it's now going through and showing me all the things that are critical. Important and minor. So it just has them all here. So if I look in the critical area, you can see that spelling mistake is pulled up. It's found that we've got a space missing in this, in this heading. It's pulling us up on the alcohol declaration as well. So we've got to do that. And if you roll this down, it actually gives you the detail and you can jump to the page where that issue is. So that's all built into the pre-proof plugin. And then nutritional facts are missing measurements. That's a good one. So that's going to go through and tell us that we're missing a few things and it gives us some more detail as well. So you know exactly what it is that you need to go and fix. So this is preproof. It's going through and giving me a whole lot of suggestions before I create a proof. So my job here would be to clear these, get it looking really, really great, and then switching back to here and clicking Create New Proof to actually upload our very first version which is going to be much, much better than if I had done it without preproof. So it's a really, really fantastic feature. If we switch over to Illustrator, so I'm going to prove it. Adobe Illustrator, here we are. So inside Adobe Illustrator, we have got our PageProof plugin, which many of you know about, but the preproof panel is coming very soon. So you'll be able to Choose your agent from inside of Illustrator, click Review, and it will do a check of your work inside of Illustrator and give you those suggestions that you can make. So there is pre-proof coming soon for Illustrator. It's coming soon for Photoshop and coming to other products as well. So you can use your agents in all of your design tools, making suggested changes before you make a proof. Okay, so the idea of preproof, what does it solve? Why would this be important? Now, we spoke earlier about going from draft to perfection. So using preproof, there's less effort required by your reviewers. They are getting to a proof and it is just a level up compared to if you had sent it without using pre-proof. It's gonna have less errors, less mistakes. It's gonna be on brand. It's gonna have all the things that the agent has helped you with now available for your reviewers. So less effort from your reviewers, which is always good for them because as we know, reviewers aren't necessarily full-time proofers. They're usually a product manager or, you know, in another role full-time, and proofing is just something that they do as part of their day. It reduces the rounds and it reduces the versions. I mean, if you get your proofing pre-proofed, And by the time it gets to people, there are less issues. That means less rounds. That means less versions. That also means less mistakes. And this little line at the bottom here, I think, is really important. It helps you get to right first time faster. So if you've got a goal of getting your work right first time, then pre-proof actually helps you materially get to that goal. So we think this is a super good feature for a lot of design workflows. Okay, so what's on the horizon? I mean, this is, this is really interesting times, I think, with AI, you know, working with a lot of different companies, and we've got a lot of different products, and we've got a lot of different previews and things going out, working with different people. What's on the horizon? Well, obviously, pre-proof to your design tools is a really, really great thing, and you can start today with InDesign. And tomorrow, and then, you know, very, very soon you'll have Illustrator and Photoshop. But, you know, there's talk inside organizations about, hey, you know, we've put in Claude and I've been asked by our team to connect PageProof into our Claude workflows. You know, well, soon you will be able to do that. You'll be able to involve PageProof in your agentic workflows inside of any Anthropic or OpenAI products. So you'll be able to bring PageProof to those workflows. And that's something that we're looking to do probably in Q4. Pi agents inside your workflows. So we just saw the Pi agents inside of PageProof checking the proofs as they go out. We saw the Pi agents inside of pre-proof checking the work before it goes out. Coming soon, you'll be able to put those Pi agents into the workflows, into the steps of your workflow, alongside of your people. So you may have a PAI agent that checks legal, you might have a PAI agent that checks ingredients lists. So you'll be able to put those in amongst your, amongst your, your people, and they give assistance during the workflow process or as the workflow moves through. These PAI agents will come in and contribute to the overall perfection drive for your proof. And then the last one here, offering PageProof Intelligence inside automated creative workflows. Again, these are things that people are talking about. There are some organizations doing this where they might be generating material and they need it checked. And it could be, you know, high volume, you know, could be something to do like banner ads, banner ads need checking or whatever it is, then PageProof Intelligence can actually be used inside these automated creative workflows to just check over the work. So we're not sending things out without something checking it. So we want a PAI agent at least to look at, you know, hey, is this on brand? Is this correct? So these are the sorts of things which are on the horizon and coming soon to PageProof and also, also to your workflows. So if you have got these conversations going on inside your organization, you'll hear keywords like We want to use a checking agent, or we want to MCP to PageProof, those kinds of words and conversations, do talk to us because we can have conversations about how we can be involved in helping with those workflows and some of those solutions which are coming for the future. Okay, so that concludes the presentation for today, but thank you very much everybody for your participation in the webinar. This will be sent out to you in the coming days because you've registered. And we look forward to seeing what you can do with PageProof Intelligence and hearing more feedback from you about things we can add into this as we go forward. Thanks very much, everyone. Have a good day.