Artwork Guidelines
Essential Guide Preparing Files For
Printing in 4 Steps
To ensure the artwork you create on screen is reproduced correctly you always need to save your file as a PDF
What is a PDF?
Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format used to present and exchange documents reliably, independent of software, hardware, or operating system. Invented by Adobe, PDF is now an open standard maintained by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
Adobe PDFs preserve all the data in the original file - even when text, graphics, spreadsheets, and more are combined in a single file. PDFs look just the way you intend them to, but this can be a problem as PDFs are not usually editable files.
To prevent any potential problems with your file, all you need to do is meet the basic requirements for a PDF.
Don’t worry, these standards are easy to implement and won’t affect your artwork at all.
Bleed
How much bleed?
“Bleed” refers to extending your design beyond the borders of a printed page. Incorporating a bleed allows you to run your design right to the edge of a printed page, so it’s important if your design elements or background color extend to the very edge of your design – the last thing you want is an unexpected white border.
Although generally the bleed amount is set to 3 millimetres or 1/8 of an inch, bleed requirement can be different from one job to another.
| Trim to size boards: | 3 mm |
| Banners Vinyl: | 3 mm |
| Flags / Tablecloths: | 30 mm |
Certain fabrics - blockout / backlit / stretch polyesters - require extra bleed based on the size of the print. There are also specific products that require templates to ensure they fit with the supplied hardware. Contact your printer for a template to ensure the design is set up correctly from the start.
Follow these steps:
Colour Mode
CMYK is the Key!
This example shows several CMYK process swatches, one RGB process swatch, and one Pantone Spot swatch. The RGB swatches should be changed to CMYK process swatches.
If this job is quoted/estimated to print in only CMYK, then the spot colours should be changed to 4-color process colours.
If this job is to print using just spot Pantone colours, then that is all that should be shown in the swatches palette.
But why?
Computer monitors give off coloured light known as RGB (CMYK is coloured ink). They have a larger colour gamut than printing, which is why a computer can display a million more colours than what can be achieved with printing. Printing deals with absorption and reflection of wavelengths of which we perceive as colour (CMYK). Sometimes you will note that something looked different on screen than it does on paper and it is because of the different colour ranges that computer monitors and printing allows.
Follow these steps:
Layers
Use layers to help your printer
Layers can keep certain parts of a design distinct from others, or provide separations for cut and crease paths.
Cutter guides:
For product packaging and bespoke shaped products you will need to create cut and crease lines.
Set up the cut line on one layer and the crease lines on a separate layer, each with a line thickness of 1 point and spot stroke colour named with ‘Cut’ prefix (i.e. ‘Cutter’, ‘Cut-Crease’, Cut-Drill’...).
Always save out the PDF with the cut and crease lines visible.
Remember! You’ll need to add bleed around your cut guide.
In short, be sure that your artwork is all in a single layer named “Artwork”, anything else that your job could need must be in separated layers.