Providing your own print-ready artwork

If you’re supplying your artwork to us ready-to-print please read these guidelines. Providing your artwork to us ‘print ready’ means we don’t need to do anything to it prior to printing. If we do need to work on it for whatever reason, it is not print ready and us making it so will incur you an additional cost.

Print-ready artwork should meet the following requirements:

• Artwork should be in CMYK for 4-colour process colour printing (not RGB), with any Spot colours identified if these are required in addition (eg. for specific Pantone colour matching or specialty colours like fluorescent orange). If you provide it in other colour models it is not print-ready - we can convert it for you, but you should carefully check any colour shifts before approving for printing.
• All fonts used should be outlined or rasterised prior to creating your final artwork file. Otherwise your file is not print-ready - we can fix it if you use common fonts, or provide PC font files with your artwork.
• For best print results, artwork is best created in such programs as Illustrator, InDesign, or other vector-based design software. Otherwise Photoshop, Paintshop or other graphics programs can be used as long as they can create a high-quality 300 DPI or greater bitmap graphics output file.
• Artwork should be provided with 3mm bleed, that is your artwork needs to be 3mm higher and wider than the final size. This is because your printing is made on an overlarge sheet of paper and then trimmed back to the final size so we can get colour to the edge. So if you are designing a 86x54mm business card, use a canvas size of 92x60mm and expect to lose the outer 3mm (so don’t put anything important in there!).
• As there may be small errors in guillotining, try to keep any important information at least 3mm away from the edge of the artwork. For the same reason, it is best to avoid putting thin borders around or close to the edge of your artwork.
• If you can, please provide your artwork as a PDF file. Otherwise a high-quality 300 DPI or greater TIFF, BMP, JPG or EPS file will work. If you are supplying artwork for 1-colour or 2-colour printing, please provide as an EPS file. Files in Microsoft Word or Publisher, or in other native formats, are not print-ready.
• You are welcome to email us your artwork, upload it through our website or a 3rd-party service like yousendit.com, or bring it in on a CD or memory stick.

If you have any further questions about print-ready artwork, just ask us.