Rahul DS Production artist · Schawk India · Chennai
Artwork that
holds up.
Three years at Schawk, taking supplied artwork to a released standard for Danone and Nutricia. These are the files that ship to market in the Gulf, Europe, Latin America and the US.
Most of it arrives half‑finished: brand guidelines on one side, a production spec on the other, a 24‑hour clock running on both. My job is to close that gap without anyone downstream noticing there was one.
- 3years at Schawk
- 20–25released files a week
- <1file reworked a month
- 24hstandard turnaround
- 13language markets
Registration
Four plates have to land on the same millimetre.
Scroll to pull the separations into register. Miss by a hair and type fringes, edges ghost, the barcode stops scanning. This is the tolerance every decision on the rest of this page is made against.
Out of register
About
Someone has to be the last check.
I’m a production artist at Schawk in Chennai. Since 2023 I’ve prepared packaging artwork for Danone and Nutricia across infant nutrition, medical nutrition and dairy, for markets from the Gulf to Brazil.
The work I like most is the recovery work. Finding why a file won’t separate, why a barcode won’t scan on that substrate, why type is sitting in a band the film will stretch. Catching it at my desk costs an hour. Catching it at the print site costs a plate.
The medium matters less than the discipline. Whether the output is a carton, a label or a screen, the job is the same: read the spec, respect the brand, judge whether what’s in front of you is good enough, and raise it with someone when it isn’t. When something is ambiguous I settle it with the print site or the creative team and update the ticket, rather than returning the file and losing the turnaround.
- Education
- B.Sc. Visual Communication, Vels University, Chennai. First Class, 2023
- Also
- Short-form video direction and post in Premiere Pro and After Effects. A scaled architectural model built by hand, concept to finish
- Languages
- Tamil (native) · Telugu (native) · English (professional) · Hindi (conversational)
Skills
What I’m actually good at.
Toolset
Selected work
Eleven files that went to press.
Released production artwork for Danone and Nutricia packs in thirteen languages. Not concepts. Open any piece to zoom into the cut contour, the dimension callouts and the print‑site rules. The pink technical layer is the client’s supplied spec drawing. The artwork is the part I built to satisfy it.
Release checklist
Nine checks before anything leaves.
A job arrives as a design that has to become a manufacturable pack, in a language I don’t read, against a spec sheet that decides what is allowed. The standard is fixed, so the judgement is in reading it correctly and knowing when to escalate instead of guess.
Read the nine checks
Contact