If you decide to setup your own artwork we will provide you with guidelines to ensure that when you hand it over it’s ready to print. It’s a quite simple set of guidelines that ensures you’ll get the best possible print while also avoiding any additional setup fees.
The first thing you need to do is make sure any text is converted to vectors, that way we can make sure that your text won’t look strange when we process and print your file. This is something you can only do in professional design software like Adobe Illustrator or Coral Draw so if you’re using consumer level software like Microsoft Office then make a note of the fonts used and let us know. Better yet if you have the font files themselves, perhaps you downloaded them from the internet, then send those along with your file.
Image resolution is a big factor in getting good quality prints and so we always try to stress to customers creating their own artwork that they need to have good quality images. 300ppi is the standard resolution for print so whether you’re taking photographs or pulling images from another location always try and aim for that resolution. Higher is obviously better but anything lower will start to show on your prints. This is especially important as while we can fix many errors for you this is one thing that ultimately can’t be fixed.
An area customers can trip up on when they create their own designs can be the bleed, if you’ve never dealt with the print industry before it’s understandable. Basically a bleed is extra space around the artwork that extends the colours or imagery beyond the bounds of the print. The reason we need this is because you can’t print all the way to the edge of a piece of paper, what we do to get that effect is print or sheets slightly larger than the finished product and then trim off the edges to get that effect. Basically as a rule of thumb you should extend any colours or imagery 5mm out from each edge so we can trim it down. This does bring to question another important point, we also need a 5mm margin around the outer edge of the print to ensure all the text and important information stays on the page during trimming. That just means that no information should be closer than 5mm to the edge of the page.
One thing we don’t need are any kind of crop marks, registration marks, or any other kind of printers marks. These tend to get into the way and we normally remove them from a customers file before we print it.
Finally as for the file type we find a PDF normally has the best results, so no matter what software you make your artwork in if you save if as a PDF then we should be able to open it.
If you have any questions about setting up your artwork feel free to contact us and we’ll be more than happy to help.