by 300dpi (Resolution)
As a general rule, professionally printed documents need to be saved in high quality 300dpi (dots per inch). Documents printed to your local home printer can be from 144dpi, and documents being emailed / viewed on screen only are generally saved at 72 or 96dpi.
Bleed
When a printer requests that your document has “bleed” this means that the document will need to have at least 3mm “extra” of your design around all edges for the printer to trim off. Basically so your photo will go to the edge of the page without a white border being shown.
Cutter Guide
Templates will have a cutter guide which will show text boundaries, bleed area and page edge.
Printer Marks
Printer marks are illustrative guides around artwork that give information to the printer. For example crop marks in each corner show where the bleed is and where to trim the final artwork.
Colours
RGB
Red, green, blue – these are screen colours and range from 0-255
CMYK
Cyan, magenta, yellow, black – these are print colours and range from 0-100%
# Number
This is the website code number for a specific colour
HSB
Hue, saturation, brightness
LAB
Refers to the human perception of light to make accurate colour balance corrections
Pantone Colours
Used for matching a specific ink colour when printing. Pantone use a numbering system to identify each colour.
Special Finishes – Spot UV
Gloss can be applied to the surface of your business card, creating a clear and shiny layer in your own design on top of the printed artwork. This allows you to direct attention to the important aspects of your printed design, or to create subtle design elements that can only be seen reflecting in the light.
GSM
GSM stands for “Grams per Square Meter” and basically measures the weight of the paper. The heavier the paper weight the thicker the paper. For example business cards should be printed on at least 400gsm thick card.
Software We Work With
Your artwork will be created with the following Adobe programmes:
- Adobe Illustrator (vector based – for logo design & illustrations)
- Photoshop (photography – special design effects)
- Indesign (catalogues, brochures, anything with a lot of text)
- Bridge (file system where you can view Adobe files as thumbnails)
- Acrobat Professional (editable PDFs)
If you have your own artwork, it will need to be set up properly in one of the above programmes, so it can exported correctly to PDF (with bleed / CMYK / 300dpi / embedded links / outlined text). We can convert Microsoft files correctly to Adobe format for you for a small fee.
File formats:
Photoshop: jpg, PSD, tif, png, export to PDF
Illustrator: ai, EPS, export to PDF
Indesign: indd, export to PDF or packaged indd file
Embedded Links & Outlined Text
If you are supplying an Illustrator file, very often we receive these with the links (images) missing and the text not outlined. Both of these things are important so your document prints as it should. If you need help with this, please contact us.
What is the difference between Vector & Pixel?
If you have something such as a logo in vector format, then this means it is re-sizable without losing any quality to the image, much like how a font works when you increase the size of it. Vectors are usually created in specialist illustration programmes such as Adobe Illustrator and are made of curves, lines, points and polygons.
Pixels were made for photography. When zoomed in you will see a square grid of building blocks which make up the final image.
Proofing
It is vital when we send over your proof that you check EVERYTHING is correct before signing off your artwork. It is up to the client to read through the copy and ensure that all of the content is in place as SDPS aren’t liable for any mistakes noticed after sign off. Once the printing process has begun, unfortunately we can’t stop the work.
