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Artwork Guide
In this section we have provided you with some hints and tips as well as letting you know how to supply us with the files we need to your work. Don’t worry if you don’t understand all the printing terminology, we’ll try to explain it as we go through this guide.
We’ll always check over any artwork you send to us before we print it and won’t print any old rubbish. If we’re at all concerned with it, we’ll get in touch and let you know but it is your responsibility to try and make sure your artwork is set up correctly. Here at Talking Horse Design & Print we know that setting artwork up for print can be tricky and in a perfect World here is how we’d ideally like your artwork:
- Set up at 100%
- Supplied as a print ready pdf (produced using the press quality option).
- All fonts embedded or converted to outlines (we advise this to avoid any disappointment with a font not coming out as intended).
- Set up in CMYK colour and not RGB.
- 3mm bleed on each edge.
- At least a 4mm safe zone (no text near the edges). For jobs A5 up we would recommend no less than 10mm.
- Crop marks so we know where you want us to cut your job
- Good quality images (images off the internet will generally not be of a high enough quality to reproduce well).
With that said, we realise that the World isn’t perfect and that you might not have the relevant software to do the above. If this is the case then don’t worry, we can still print your job! Get in touch with us via the Contact page and we’ll happily help and advise on the best way forward.
Colour
Your file will be printed in full colour, CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black). These four colours generally make up any print job. If your job is set up using Pantone (PMS (Pantone Matching System)) colours then these will be converted to CMYK. Should you wish to have your job produced with PMS colours then please contact us and we’ll prepare a quote for you. Be aware that supplying files that you have created using RGB (Red, Green and Blue) will not print out the same as they look on screen. This is due to various reasons but without boring you too much all commercial printers use CMYK ink/toner to print with rather than RGB. Your TV at home and computer monitor all use the RGB way to display colours onto your screen as the RGB colour spectrum is vast compared to CMYK but when it comes to putting ink onto paper, CMYK is the daddy.
Paper Sizes
To the right are diagrams showing the sizes of paper in relation to each other and a list, below, of all the standard sizes to aid you when setting your file up.
Standard sizes (all in mm):
Business Card – 85 x 55
DL (Compliment Slip size) – 210 x 99
A6 – 148 x 105 A5 – 210 x 148
A4 – 297 x 210 A3 – 420 x 297
A2 – 594 x 420 A1 – 840 x 594
A0 – 1188 x 840
Bleed and Safe Zone
Bleed is an important part of printing and understanding it is vital. What is bleed? In simple terms it is where an image etc drops off the edge of the page. As printers, we need an extra bit of the image to cut into though so that when we cut your item down to size we cut into the actual image otherwise you might have white strips down certain edges.
Having a safe zone from the edge of your job means that text etc is kept well away from any risk of getting cut. We don’t want you to get the perfect artwork for your job only to have bits cut off.
The diagram to the right should help illustrate the points above.
All the machines we use have a tollerence of +-3mm so this is one reason we suggest the safe zones etc.
Spot UV
Looking to have a spot UV added to your cards? Then we require your file to be supplied in a certain way. We require what you want spot uv’ed as a separate page in your pdf file. The diagram to the right should help you as we show you what part of the image we’d want spot uv’ed. In this example we want all the horses to shimmer with the spot UV effect.
