• Do you have print-ready made Artwork? If you want to submit your own files you need to follow a few simple rules to ensure the best possible final outcome. We will print what you give us. However, the old saying still applies “Bad Artwork in, bad printing out”. Many customers provide us with artwork samples that do not pass the test for best printing quality results. 
• Print Ready – files provided must be professionally checked to make sure that the product printed quality is the best that it can be to satisfy the digital quality control, our designers will check for quality artwork and will confirm with you whether changes need to be made. One of the biggest challenges of providing Print Ready Artwork is to have the paper size correctly set up, for example, adding a 2mm bleed to each edge wherever colour runs off the edge of the media. So, for example, a business card is trimmed to 90mm x 55mm. So your bleed must extend to 90mm x 58mm. This means that when trimmed, you won’t end up with nasty white edges. For multi-page booklets, add extra bleed and for fridge magnets stick 5mm on each edge.
• Avoid thin borders at all costs, and keep your text or important images well away from the edges – at least 5mm.
• It all sounds very technical. However, our designers are always here to help out with any additional information that you may need. 

Getting the colours right

• One of the biggest challenges in print quality is colour matching. For example, printing in spot colours – is much easier as we can match your Pantone (PMS) colours to a perfect colour result. However, if your project is made up of CMYK- cyan, magenta, yellow and black then this becomes more challenging. When printing in four colour processes the results can be affected by any number of conditions so the chances of your colours being a perfect match are difficult. Our designers can help you define the requirements so that we will not encounter problems.  
• With four colour processes, you must supply all images as CMYK – we don’t use Red, Green or Blue ink so please don’t send us RGB files – your bitmaps will come out in very poor quality (washed out). We would require that all vectors and bitmaps are made up of CMYK values only.
• It is also important to avoid tints of less than 10% of either C, M, Y or K as they can print much lighter than they appear on your screen. For best results go for 10% – 30% tints.
• An important rule to remember is that the colours appearing on your computer or digital device cannot be reproduced on printed paper as the electronic devices are illuminated at extremely high pixels so the colours on such devices always appear to be much brighter. 
• Also, printing on different types of paper stocks will affect the colour quality of the printed product. a colour that looks ultra glossy & vibrant on a coated gloss stock will look quite different when printed on porous laser stock letterheads. Ask our team to show you samples of colours on different stocks to be sure.

Working with Photos

• If you are scanning photos, save them as either EPS or TIFF files to get the best colour & clarity. If you are scanning a printed image out of a magazine then you will need to remove the moire which actually blurs the image slightly. Always scan at 300dpi at the size you are going to use the images at. And remember to convert the images from RGB to CMYK.

Working with Websites

• Working with websites the rules slightly change to those set for printing. If you are wondering about different image files like JPG, PNG, GIF, and SVG, just know that on a website you are most likely to use a JPEG (JPG) or a PNG format. Choosing the best file format for websites is very important, we have tested various file formats from many different file formats available, we have selected the four main file formats that best suit a dynamic responsive website as follows: JPEG, PNG, SVG and GIF, all of which contain a lossy or lossless compression. Also noting that images should always be not less than 300dpi and for any CMYK images or logos to be converted to RGB for clear dynamic online resolution. If in doubt please do not hesitate to contact us for more information or design advice. 

Content Text

• For best results, it is not recommended to create content text in a bitmap programme such as Photoshop. You can import your bitmaps into Illustrator or CorelDraw and overtype the text as vectors so that the text appears sharp and clear. Pixelated text is very unattractive and not acceptable in any printed project. It is always recommended to convert your text to curves, paths or outlines otherwise matching the required font type becomes very difficult.