Producing print ready artwork
Preparing your artwork for print is one the most critical activities in the process of delivering your final print work to a high quality standard and in both a timely and cost-effective way.
We understand that most of our customers are marketing professionals working to tight deadlines and tight budgets, by getting your artwork preparation right first time you can save considerable time in the pre-press phase of production and potentially considerable costs can be avoided in terms of artwork having to reworked.
We are in the process of updating all of our artwork guides to make them as up to date and useful as possible. Please see our latest update on common problems below or download the PDF here.
Here at Pepper we work to the Pass4press Guidelines. Click on the links below to view the PDF's
Quick Guide for Document preparation.
Configuring Applications
InDesign CS3 and QuarkXpress 7
The Complete Pass4Press 9 Brochure
These documents can also be found at the Pass4Press website.
Top 10 problems with PDFs
Unfortunately, things can go wrong with a PDF file, even with the best intentions. Here are the top 10 features of problematic PDF’s. Use this checklist to remember the main things to check.
- Placed image resolution too low
- Fonts not embedded
- Wrong colour space assigned
- Incorrect trim or bleed information
- Inconsistency with native file (hairlines, gradients)
- Spot colour misnamed or converted to process
- Too much compression (artifacts, quality loss)
- Incorrect page size information
- Transparent object issues
- Incorrect or missing ICC profile
Top Tips
We've complied these top tips from the mistakes that we see our clients making most often, these are;
- Colour
- Bleed
- Trim Marks
- Spell Check
Colour
By far the most common problem we have with supplied artwork is the colour. Files like photos and graphics need to be supplied to us as Greyscale (Black and white), CMYK (known as four colour process) or Spot Colour (such as Pantone). We tend to find that artwork from non-agencies tend to consist of RGB (Red, Green and Blue).This tends to come from photos taken on Digital Cameras. All digital cameras take photos as RGB as it contains the largest colour spectrum available. That’s why a nice scenery shot will have vivid blue sky and bright green grass. When the image is converted to 4 colour (CMYK) it cant cover the same spectrum range and the colours will change. This may result in disappointment as the colour range the client wants is unachievable. To avoid this make sure all your photos are converted to CMYK so you can see the colour change and make adjustments until you are happy with the final picture. If you leave the RGB image in your work we cannot guarantee the final appearance of the printed material.
Note the colour differences between the above graphics. On the left is the more vivid RGB graphic and on the right is CMYK graphic.
Bleed
This is a printing term that refers to artwork that goes beyond the edge of the sheet after trimming. The bleed is the part on the edge of your document that allows for "printer bounce" when cutting a job down to size. We recommend that you supply the artwork with 3mm of bleed. Failing to provide bleed can result in finished pieces showing a thin area of white on the edge.
Trim Marks
This are small lines which indicate where the sheet will be cut or trimmed down to the final size.
Spell check
This may seem obvious but you would be amazed how many jobs come to us with incorrect spelling. Out of courtesy we run a quick spell check over documents that we can access but we strongly recommend that you do this BEFORE sending your artwork to us.
We are in the process of compiling a series of useful guides to help with your artwork preparation. Watch this space for more in depth guides to preparing and submiting artwork in a number of formats.
Another useful tip, if your document includes multiple files - images, graphics and text, please remember to use either WinZip (PC users) or StuffIT(Mac Users) to 'collect' all these files together into a single zipped or stuffed file. Then send all your document elements together in this zipped or stuffed file.
Once you have your artwork file ready, you can send it directly to Pepper using our file upload service.
If you require any help in preparing print ready artwork or if you require any more information on this subject please do not hesitate to call us on 0845 0603050 and we'll be happy to help.
