Here are our top 10 artworking tips for sending us print ready files which will help you understand our process and ensure we deliver the graphics you’re expecting. We all want to see your beautiful artwork print exactly how you imagined. You’ve spent ages perfecting your design, preparing it for print is just as important. Here are our top 10 tips for sending us your files which we hope will help you understand our process. You’ll also find a handy PDF download towards the bottom of the page to refer to when you need it.
The bleed stops nasty unprinted material showing around the cut-line, so to prevent this, please add at least 3mm to the artwork. Larger items such as printed wallpaper, wall vinyl, polycril and window graphics may need extra, so if you’re unsure give us more!
Trim marks, tick marks, crops, whatever you want to call them, we don’t need them because our pre-press ensures that our cutters know where to trim. If your artwork has a cut-path, you won’t need trim marks, but please label your cut-path using a spot colour called CutContour and set to ‘overprint stroke’.
Fabrics have slightly different bleed and trims because of the way they are installed and the they way they shink and stretch during the production process. FabriFrames need 25mm bleed. FabriGrabs need 50mm bleed. Try to keep text and logos at least 50mm away from the edge of artwork.
Please supply your files as CMYK and make sure that any critical colours are set up and labelled correctly as Pantone spot colours. Provide a CMYK equivalent for any other special colours and we’ll get the best match possible.
If you are supplying artwork in a format other than a PDF, please include all linked images and font files.
We prefer print ready PDFs but we also accept artwork files supplied as Adobe Photoshop PSD, Illustrator AI/EPS and Indesign INDD.
Dots per inch (dpi) determines the detail of the artwork. Images with a low dpi can look blurry or pixelated when they’re printed. We prefer to work with a minimum of 300dpi. Images grabbed off the internet (typically 72dpi or less) just won’t do and will result in a poor print quality.
Comic Sans walked into a bar, the barman said “We don’t serve your type in here!”…
We don’t discriminate against fonts, but please path them. Some PDF compression won’t embed them, so we kindly ask that you create outlines (path) your fonts or send the font files with the artwork.
We like artwork at full size (100%), but sometimes, due to large scale graphics this isn’t possible. Label your artwork file with the scale such as HALF or QUARTER to avoid getting a tiny print of your exhibition stand design.
Our FTP is a busy place so to help us find your artwork please reference it with both the job reference number and your company name.
Find a link to our FTP at top right of our web pages or click here
