QA - Quality Assurance

During my time at Marvel as a Digital Compositor with a focus in Quality Assurance, I assembled, designed, and conducted quality control passes for thousands of digital comics materials including well-known properties from Marvel (Amazing Spider-Man, Avengers, X-Men), 20th Century Fox (Predator, Aliens, Planet of the Apes), Lucasfilm (Star Wars, The Mandalorian, Darth Vader) and more.

QA, or Quality Assurance, is an important part of the digital publishing process that guarantees that both readers and vendors trust that the books delivered are high-quality products that reflect the original printed material.

My role combined design, production, and QA - for each digital collection, using various design programs like InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat, I carefully compiled the necessary design materials and then performed rigorous quality control passes to prepare each book for digital distribution and sale, making adjustments to the files as needed:

 

Typos

If typos are caught at this stage of production, I have the chance to update and improve the layout or lettering files for the digital edition and any future reprints.

 

Design Layouts

Occasionally, art layers shift or need to be scaled up to fit to their intended size/placement — since readers have the ability to zoom in even further on digital formats, making sure art lines up properly ensures the whole reading experience is clean and seamless.

 

Lettering Files

At this stage of production lettering files are ready to print, but sometimes additional settings have to be adjusted specifically to make the file display properly for digital formats — for instance, gradient and stroke transparencies need to be carefully checked so that text can be easily read on top.

 

Word Bubbles

Sometimes there can be crucial adjustments needed for word bubbles as well — making sure bubble tails point to the correct character, or that word bubbles/sound effects are properly lined up to the correct art and panel borders helps to increase legibility and clarity for the reader.