Even if you’re a skilled designer, it can be a little intimidating to prepare your art for print. Make sure your printing and finishing design mistakes aren’t as bad as they could be by following these simple steps. You should be able to get your print job done perfectly in no time!
1. COLOR MODE: RGB TO CMYK
Print designers often make the mistake of choosing the wrong colour mode. However, just remember to always use CMYK colour mode (cyan, magenta, yellow, black). It’s important for print documents to have the three primary colours (cyan, magenta, and yellow). Black is used to making darker shades of those colours.
When you mix different colours of light together, you get a new colour. The primary colours are shades of red, green, and blue (RGB). Computer screens show this colour. When you see colour in everyday things, like print, it’s subtractive (CMYK). The RGB colour spectrum is a lot bigger than the CMYK colour spectrum, so when you print something, the colour might not look the way you want it to. For example, it might look duller. This means that, while working on your designs in Illustrator and Photoshop, make sure you switch to CMYK colour mode so that you can see how your designs will look when they’re printed on paper.
Printers lay down colour in layers, which is why adding more colour makes the colour deeper and richer. You should mix 40% blue, 20% magenta, and 20% yellow with 100% black in order to make the black richer. Keeping your black text sharp, on the other hand, means that you should only use 100% black. The mix of colours doesn’t work well for text and will make it less sharp.
2. Make sure there is a bleed.
You need to make sure that your design has a little bit of print at the edge that gets cut off when it’s printed. So, you need to make your art a little bigger. When a print is cut to size, the cut isn’t always 100% correct. Then, if you don’t add the bleed, you could end up with a white line around the edge of your print where the art ends. In order to use printonweb.in, you need a bleed of 3mm. Some programmes let you apply a bleed when you save art as a PDF. Programs like PowerPoint don’t have this feature, so you’ll need to make the page size a little bigger to make room for a bleed.
3. Add fonts. This is the third thing you can do to
As a result, if you don’t put in fonts when your document is opened on a computer that doesn’t have them, they’ll be used instead. This isn’t ideal because you don’t want them to change when you print them.
Open your document in Illustrator or InDesign, highlight the text, and then choose Type in the top menu. Then choose ‘Create Outlines.’ This will embed or outline your fonts in the document. As soon as you save your files, your text will be in outline form.
Make sure your document is open by clicking on it and then clicking on “Options” from the drop-down menu. Then, you can add fonts to your document. Once you have ‘Options’ open, switch to the ‘Save’ tab. This will save your changes. To do this, choose “Embed Fonts in the File” and click OK. Then re-save your file.
4) Make sure the crop marks are there.
Crop marks help us figure out how big we want the document to be, but they shouldn’t be added by hand. Most design apps that let you export PDFs have an option to add crop marks.
5. Make sure there is a place that is safe.
Please don’t put text or important information on your art in the safe area, which is the area near the trim marks. During print finishing, there will always be a little bit of movement, so it’s important to keep artwork away from this area. This way, important information won’t be accidentally cut off.
6. Use images with high resolution.
The PPI in image resolutions is the number of pixels per inch. In general, the more PPI your picture has, the clearer and more detailed it will be. In the case of brochures and business cards, images should be sized to 300 PPI because they are seen from a closer distance.
Dots on wide format printers are much bigger than they are on normal printers. Because wide-format graphics are usually seen from a distance, 150 PPI is all that’s needed. Anything more than 150 PPI makes the file size too big and doesn’t improve the quality of the print.
7. TO MAKE VECTOR ART: Do this
The best thing to do when you’re making something for a big project is to make the art in vector format as much as possible. When you do this, your art can be made to be any size without losing quality.
8. Make sure to keep an eye on the number of pages and look for booklets
When making a stitched book, the pages must be in 4-page increments. Because pages are stapled together, there is a “creep” that needs to be taken into account as well. A book will be made by cutting off the open ends. Make sure your artwork doesn’t reach too close to the edge of the page. This will make the book look better. It’s often hard to read the page numbers in the corners because they are so close together that they could be cut off.
Following these rules will allow you to generate a Print-Ready PDF, our recommended mode of file submission.