Prepping Your Printing Files

Make sure your artwork is the correct size for your final printed product.

Common sizes for most of our printing products are:
sizing is in this order - width x height

BUSINESS CARDS:
3.5" x 2" - with no bleeds
3.75" x 2.25" - with bleeds

LETTERHEADS or COMMON FLYER:
8.5" x 11" - with no bleeds
8.75" x 11.25" - with bleeds

HALF FLYER:
5.5" x 8.5" - with no bleeds
5.75" x 8.75" - with bleeds

TRI-FOLD BROCHURE
8.5" x 11" - with no bleeds
8.75" x 11.25" - with bleeds

Each of the three panels needs to be 3.66" wide,
with allowances of margin on each side for text.

Bleeds are a major consideration, and is required if your artwork needs to have the appearance that the artwork is larger than the product itself. For example you may have a Business Card that you want to have your picture that shows all the way to the edges of the card. See below for examples of bleed.

The reason bleeds may be required, is that extra final cutting or trimming is required to get the full "to edge effect", allowing spacing for the next adjacent card or flyer to be cut

For any jobs that have bleed, please extend your artwork on ALL FOUR SIDES by 1/8" or .125", even if your artwork only bleeds on one side.

For example:
If you have a business card, with the standard finish size of 3.5" x 2", add .125" to each side so that your final artwork size is 3.75" x 2.25" which will add the required bleed and allow us to properly cut or trim to size.

While this is not as critical as the two above requirements, it will improve your color fidelity if implemented.

For users savy with Photoshop, Illustrator, Affinity it is best to save your color images with a Adobe RGB (1998) profile for optimal color results. This will ensure a wider color gamut when converted for our printing process.

First and foremost, all electronic devices vary somewhat in their color rendition and is only an approximate rendition of your print job. It is unreasonable to expect a printer to match exactly your design shown on your mobile device or computer monitor for the following reasons:

1) Your device shows colors based on emitting light, mainly Red, Blue, and Yellow and a combination of all three compared to printing which applies ink (offset) or toner (digital) to a substrate surface (paper).

Light is much brighter than any inks or toner used and also the paper used. Paper can come in different brightness levels and varies depending on the quality and cost of paper used. For this reason alone, colors on your mobile device or computer monitor will ALWAYS appear brighter, more saturated, or vivid than the final printed product.

2) Colors on your device, will also vary depending on:

• lighting conditions
• device manufacturer
• device age
• screen resolution, etc.

For smaller print runs, digital is ideal for most jobs. Digital has the advantage of using a plastic based toner that is more opaque than ink and allows more of the color fidelity to show through compared to offset. Digital prints can often appear to have more POP or appear more vivid compared to offset printing. Again, paper type used will affect the final printed product - a higher quality paper will produce a better quality print.

The disadvantage of digital, is that some solid colors (especially areas with large coverage) can be difficult to maintain a uniform color throughout or some colors simply cannot match specific color ranges (oranges and some greens for example) as well as a solid offset Pantone ink color.

For large quantity jobs or jobs that require Pantone color system matching, offset printing is the ideal process for cost value and also color fidelity for logos or text that must be color consistent throughout. Because offset is ink based, the color will be more consistent throughout the print job.

For full color jobs (a combination of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black ink is used to comprise the colors). Please be aware that the final appearance can vary depending on the paper stock used for the job - a high quality gloss paper will reproduce the colors more accurately than an offset paper, which tends to absorb more ink and loses its color fidelity somewhat due to the inks overlapping in colors causing the ink to muddy or lose some saturation.