For our company to print your job properly, artwork needs to be set up as a PDF “Print ready” file. There are some important factors to achieve this.

Colour Mode
When your start to design your document the file should be set up as CMYK, this is what we call four colour process and stands for Cyan (blue), Magenta (red), Yellow & Black. We print using different proportions of these 4 colours to create a wide range of colours. When saving your document to a PDF you will also need to check that this is set up as CMYK.

High Resolution
Images are composed of pixels. Image “resolution” is simply the number of “pixels per inch” or “dots per inch” in the image.
There are two aspects to every image:

• it’s size (width & height) and resolution (number of pixels or dots per inch)

All images placed in your document need to be saved as high resolution files (300dpi). If they are saved lower than this pixilation can occur, which can cause the artwork and images to look very broken and rough edged. Any images that you scan should also be scanned at 300dpi.

When you finally save your document as a PDF you may be able choose an option that will save your document as “Press quality” or “High quality print”, this may vary on different programmes, so you may need to explore your programme further to find out how to save your PDF as a high resolution document.

Bleed
If the artwork on your printed image goes right to the edge of the page, you will need to ‘bleed’ the image slightly over the edge - i.e. make it slightly bigger than page size by 3mm on all sides. We then cut through the extended area when we trim your pages to size. If your image only goes to the page edge, you could be left with a small but very noticeable white edge. It is therefore very important, if your artwork extends to edge of the page, to ensure you add bleed.

Crop marks / trim marks
Crop Marks may be drawn on manually or automatically applied with some desktop publishing software programs.

Adding bleed and crop marks manually

Bleed
If the finished size of your document is A4 (210mm x 297mm), then you would need to make the document larger to allow for bleed. As we require 3mm of bleed to each edge, you would set your document up to 216mm x 303mm. When you layout your document, you need to remember to keep all the information you want within your A4 size, in other words you must leave 3mm around each edge. We suggest placing copy no closer than 8mm from the trim size.

Crop marks
If your desktop application does not have a function to set crop marks, not to worry, as long as your document has 3mm of bleed than we will take care of the crop marks here in our studio.