Technical Tips - A Guide For Submitting Print Ready Artwork

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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 are printed correctly.  
If you are using Mircosoft Office to prepare your documents you can save yourself a lot of time if you undertake the following checks. If you can't do these yourself our graphic design team can make sure your document is print ready but please note there is an additional charge to use this service. 

1. Check page setup - make sure the pages are set to the size you want them printed in
2. Use page breaks - this is especially important if the document is long. Word documents automatically reformats as its being produced which allows text to reflow from one page to another. When the document is opened on a different computer it can cause the content to reformat like 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 for example. To avoid this insert page breaks where appropriate instead of hitting the return key to get to a new page. 
3. Use standard fonts - If you use special or unusual fonts they are unlikely to be available to us and so Word documents will substitute your font for another available one and so we won't know that it's not the font you intended to use. 
4. Avoid using web graphics or clipart because they are 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. This because web graphics are usually made up of 72 pixels per inch and to produce high quality print image it is necessary for images to contain a minimum of 150 pixels per inch (or 300 pixels per inch for large format printing such as posters).
5. Avoid using transparent backgrounds - transparent backgrounds tend to turn into a messy crosshatch pattern when it is printed and it will 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 it generates smaller files and when its used right it ensures that all the graphics and fonts are properly embedded and will print correctly no matter what computer you print them from. 

You should make sure the following are in place 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 better avoided.

 Tidy My Design Service

This is our graphic design package that will save you a lot of time which you can use to get on with the real business. All you have to do is let us know as much about the project as you can and upload your logo, text and images which we'll use to complete your design and product your print ready file. 

PROFESSIONAL DESKTOP 
PUBLISHING SOFTWARE

DTP (Desktop Publishing) software (like InDesign) is specially designed to prepare documents with the view to them being printed on press. 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

DON'T FORGET TO ALLOW FOR BLEEDS

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

Its necessary to include a 3mm bleed to the document which 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-key [black]). RGB is based on properties of light and is suitable when images are viewed on screen but not for printing with ink or toner on paper. 

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

Pantone colour maybe used if you're creating a document which is to be printed in just one of two specific colours and this lets you get exact colour matching.  To print in only Pantone colours you will need to make sure that your graphics are suitably set up. You can do this by converting them to grey-scale and then allocate them with the Pantone colour you are using within your DTP programme. 

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How to Create a Print Ready File

THE SHORT YOUTUBE VIDEO BELOW  WAS PRODUCED BY CAN PRINT AND IS REALLY HELPFUL IN SHOWING HOW TO CREATE A COMPLIANT PRINT READY PDF FILE FROM MICROSOFT WORD 2010.