These guidelines are provided to ensure that the print you get from us is the best it can be. Our print setup article is designed to help our customers understand some of the basic aspects of ‘Design for Print’ and provides the information necessary to produce a top quality print!
WHAT WE DO
We specialise in fast turnaround, high-quality digital print but we can only achieve this if your files are set up correctly. Anything that is incorrect or not to our specifications can usually be fixed, but this will take extra time, meaning that any deadlines agreed could be missed and you may incur extra costs.
If you are unclear on any of the points made within this article or have any other queries then please contact us for further details. If you are uncertain about preparing artwork to comply with our guidelines, please contact us for an artwork preparation or design quote. This will ensure the best possible print quality and you’ll be more likely to meet any deadlines you may have.
ARTWORK FILE TYPES
The type of document that you supply will very often determine the reliability of the finished product. We appreciate that not everyone has access to the latest version of the Adobe Creative Suite and we will always work with a document you have. The advice below is ‘best case’ and should be seen as such. If in doubt, ask in advance or send us the file you are working on to check.
ADOBE ACROBAT PDF FILES
PDF files are our preferred choice for fast turnaround of work. Fully ‘Portable Document Format’ this file retains all of the intended information in a stable layout format. However, it is imperative that you create PDF’s as ‘High Quality’ or preferably PDF/X-1a, with bleed, crop marks and fonts embedded and follow our imported photos guidelines, as faults in PDF’s cannot easily be ‘fixed’ later in production if you get it wrong.
ADOBE INDESIGN FILES
These are accepted if ‘collected for output’ or ‘packaged’ so that all the related files and fonts are included. Pages must be set up to the correct size and with bleed. Any missing fonts or linked images will render the file unprintable.
PHOTOSHOP FILES
These should be supplied as 300dpi (400dpi if they contain text) CMYK .TIF files. Layered Photoshop files with text still rely on fonts and as such should be saved as Photoshop PDF files. Documents should also be created with bleed.
JPEG & PNG FILES
Similar to Photoshop files, JPEG and PNG files should be supplied at a resolution of 300dpi with the colour mode set to CMYK.
MICROSOFT WORD, EXCEL, PUBLISHER AND POWERPOINT FILES
Microsoft Office applications are by far the most readily available to most customers but are in many ways problematic for printing as they rely on system information that does not embed in the document and are non-indexed RGB colour space. This means that page styles, layouts, fonts, tables etc. can reformat when opened on other computers. Please note that these programs do not conform to modern pre-press standards and on-screen colour reproduction and layout is not guaranteed. Where possible, these files need to be converted to PDF format to ensure they print correctly.
We can also accept other files and formats, but please ring and check first if timescales are critical as they may take longer.
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