You have made the decision to design produce your own artwork for print. A word of warning: sometimes, print jobs can turn out to be a lot more complicated than they first appear. Reprographics is definitely one of those areas. Here is a brief guide of how to avoid costly mistakes. Follow these very brief tips and it may enable us to process your print job without incurring additional costs.
Send your print job by email, upload or disk, and this will save a great deal of time. Post a proof and purchase order.
The best file to send is a .PDF file. Anything else may carry a file handling charge.
All full colour litho work MUST have full colour digital match proofs, which you must approve. If you do not, we cannot be held responsible for you think is incorrectly printed material. This applies to any printer.
Keep it simple, avoid using more than 4 fonts. Think about your target audience.
Do not place any text or image (unless it bleed off the page) with in 3mm of edge.
You must add bleed if any item touches edge of print job including a background colour.
Do not use text under 4 point.
Do not use large areas of black with out adding a corresponding percentage of CMY.
All images must be 300dpi, avoid compression if you want higher quality.
Check trapping (in the simplest terms possible, a bit of color printed inside of other color), you cannot print white.
Check colour space/colour management or colour profile is switched off.
Avoid using Word, Excel or Power Point for printing. They are not suitable applications for this type of work except in the case of pure text documents that would regularly be used in a legal office.
Ensure that if you are not supplying a PDF, and that you include all fonts and all images with your document.
If you are supplying a PDF, flight check the file before sending it to us.
If you are sending a PDF ensure that you embed all the fonts.
If sending a .tif file DO NOT USE LZW compression.
Check that it is the right size.
Check that the telephone number is correct.
Send a proof from the print version of the file that you send us. Check your separations are correct.
If your file is incorrect and we have taken the time to open that file, load fonts, flight check, proof, return file, recheck new file, this all carries a cost. IT IS NOT FREE.
We are always happy to take you through the process to eliminate errors, so if you have any doubts please telephone or simply ask us to produce your print job, it may surprise you how little it costs. Quite often we can reset a print job more quickly than we can correct it.