Cha-ching! You can hear it now. Your customer’s final payment is almost coming and you can actually pay for that iPad you bought on credit before you started this project. You know, the one you said would change your entire design process. (It did. You now spend way too much time playing tower defense games).

Whether we’re refugees from the paper-pushing world, digital purists, or tree-hugging environmentalists, we web designers seem to have an unreasonably strong dislike for “hard copies”. But maybe printing your final revisions is just what you need.

Are you REALLY done? Something about putting pages to ink gives you a mental signal that you better have dotted all your t’s and crossed all your i’s. (eh?) Printing out that final version helps you to pause with a subliminal gut check that you’re DONE done.

Whether you’re a designer or not, in this day and age chances are good you spend the better part of your day staring at a computer screen. Sometimes it helps to look at a design off-screen to catch inconsistencies and to re-do odd designs you dreamed up at 3am.

Lay all your pages out on the floor or pin them up on a wall. The spread helps you take a look at your entire site at once. Wow! You really did all that. Take a step back and look to see if your site wraps itself in to one coherent design. Is there a page that now just looks terribly out of place? Better open that text editor back up.

You’re done! Don’t forget to recycle.