Every printed product requires artwork in digital format in order to complete the printing process. This digital file can be prepared by you the customer, our design staff or a third party graphic designer. If you submit your own digital file design for print there are no additional charges other than for the cost of the printing itself, unless however, your design does not meet the design requirements for the product, then you will be required to correct the issue and then re-submit the file or have us correct the issues for you for an additional fee. The same holds true if you submit a file designed by a third party which does not meet our guidelines. If you choose for us to design the file for you from scratch there is a graphic design hourly rate charge that applies and is a separate charge from our online printing prices and must be pre-paid before your job is printed.
If you are printing your own artwork we require you submit it to us a press ready PDF file. The original file can be designed in any desktop publishing software (Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Express, Microsoft Word, Scribus, etc) as long as you convert it to a PDF file before you upload it to our site.
What are bleeds and why do I need them in my file?
Bleed is a term used in printing when ink on the paper runs right to the very edge of the edge of the sheet. When printing a bleed, the ink area is printed beyond where the cut line actually is by 1/16 to 1/4 of an inch. Then after printing, the excess ink is cut away leaving the printed ink right to the very edge with no margin or unprinted paper showing. Typically we require 1/16 of an inch minimum on any edge where there is ink bleed. Typical bleeds would be a background tint of color or a background photograph or graphic that bleeds off the paper edge. We also recommend keeping text or other printing that you do not want cut into at least 1/8" away from the cut edge of the printed sheets. We typically run letter size 8 1/2" x 11" sheets 2 up on 12" x 18" when bleeds are required giving able room for crop marks, bleed and bleed marks, color bars, and registration marks.
Here is an example of a job with bleed and the printing marks needed:
What is Color Space?
An assigned color space in a file design affects how the color values are interpreted by devices including your monitor, digital camera, inkjet printer, laser printer, and professional printing equipment such as digital presses and offset printing presses. Your computer monitor, digital camera, most desktop printers and some other devices use an RGB (red, blue green) color space while most professional printers use CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) to interpret the intended color values. Your RGB file while it may look good on your screen may appear different on the final printed product due to color shifts of the RGB data in your file to CMYK data values, which is why we recommend you use CMYK. All full color print jobs should be set up for CMYK color space in your file design as well as any elements placed in the design such as logos, graphics or photographs. All of the elements can be assigned a CMYK profile. If you submit an RGB file for CMYK printing the final product may have colors that appear different than what you or your designer intended.
Image Resolution
Images such as photographs from a digital camera or scanner should be a minimum of 300 dpi or dots per inch in resolution for quality printing. Anything less can produce a pixelated, rough or fuzzy look instead of a nice clean crisp image. Most images found on websites are low resolution of 72-96 dpi and are not good quality for printing. Also vector logos, images and graphics should be 1200 dpi or greater.
Creating Quality PDF Files for Commercial Printing
When exporting to a pdf you should make sure the PDF setting are set so that color and grayscale images are a minimum of 300 dpi and not downsampled lower than 300 and monochrome images are 1200 dpi minimum not downsampled lower than 1200. See screen shot below:
