Technical Tips

Technical Tips - A Guide for Submitting Print Ready Artwork

Tidy My Design Service

15 minutes of design time is included free of charge with each print job. This is generally enough time to make some standard adjustments to your artwork files to get them ready for printing.

If you think you might need some additional design time, our hourly rate is €50.00 excluding vat.
Our graphic design service usually saves our clients a lot of time. Just let us know as much as possible about the project and upload your logo, text and images. We will work closely with you to complete your design and produce print ready artwork for your approval.

PROFESSIONAL DESKTOP PUBLISHING SOFTWARE

DTP (Desktop Publishing) software (like InDesign) is designed to prepare documents for professional printing. These programmes work alongside graphics and imaging programs like Photoshop and Illustrator. The graphics programmes allow you to create and manipulate graphics files and to organise them along with text.

IMAGE SIZES FOR QUALITY PRINTING

Table layout showig image size for publication print quality

DON'T FORGET TO ALLOW FOR BLEEDS

If any element on your document layout makes contact with the document border you will have to include a bleed. This means having to print the document on a larger paper size than the document size and trimming the excess off.

It is usually necessary to include a minimum 3mm bleed to the document. This gives enough room to crop the edges without leaving any visible white border.

COLOUR TYPES

The two main colour types used by computers are RGB (Red, Green, Blue) and CMYK
(Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black). RGB is based on properties of light and is suitable when images are being viewed on screen but not for printing with ink or toner on paper.

CMYK is based on properties of ink and should always be used when a colour image is being printed. You can set your graphics files to CMYK within your graphics programme and the text colour can be set within your desk top publishing programme.

Pantone colour references maybe used if you are creating a document to be printed in just one or two specific colours. A business card with a company logo and colours is a good example. To print using Pantone colours you will need to make sure that your graphics document is suitably set up. You can do this by converting it to grey-scale and then allocating the Pantone colour you wish to use within your desk top publishing programme.

How to Create a Print Ready File in Adobe Illustrator

This short tutorial is really helpful in showing how to create print ready files from Adobe Illustrator.

DOCUMENTS PREPARED USING MICROSOFT OFFICE

Microsoft Office is not designed to automatically generate documents to be digitally printed. This means that most documents need to be converted into a suitable format before they can be printed. If you are using Microsoft Office to prepare your documents you can save yourself a lot of time by undertaking the following checks.

Check page setup - make sure the pages are set to the size you want them to be printed in.
Use page breaks - this is especially important if the document is long. Word automatically reformats as its being produced which allows text to flow from one page to another. When the document is opened on a different computer it can cause the content to reformat, for example; section headings moving from the top of one page to the bottom of another. This can throw out the layout and the table of contents. To avoid this, insert page breaks instead of hitting the return key to get to a new page.
Use standard fonts - if you use special or unusual fonts they may not be available to us and so our Word documents will substitute your font for another available one. We won't know that it's not the font you intended to use, unless you tell us.
Avoid using web graphics or clipart - because they are extremely unlikely to contain the level of resolution necessary for printing. This is because print quality is different to screen quality. A screen quality image, which looks fine on your monitor will often look ragged or pixelated when you print it. Web graphics are usually made up of between 72 and 96 pixels per inch. To produce high quality printed images it is necessary for images to contain a minimum of 150 pixels per inch ( and 300 pixels per inch for large format printing such as posters).
Avoid using transparent backgrounds - transparent backgrounds tend to turn into a messy crosshatch pattern when printed and rarely come out as intended.

PDF Format

PDF or Portable Document Format is the industry standard method for submitting artwork files for printing. This is because PDF generates smaller files and when it is used correctly, it ensures that all of the graphics and fonts are properly embedded and will print correctly no matter what computer you print them from.
When submitting a PDF file, choose the right quality setting - as a rule of thumb it is usually best to choose the highest available quality setting on your programme. Look for print quality, press quality or high quality options and 300 dpi (dots or pixels per inch).
'Low quality' or 'screen quality' won't give you good results and are best avoided.