Text Safe Area:Our standard text safe area is 3mm smaller on each edge than the finished size of the card. Inside this area is safe for all information to be as well as graphics. If there is any text or graphics outside this area then there is a chance that it will get cut off when the card is trimmed.
Bleed:Bleed is added to give continuous colour and/or image right to the edge of a job. Without bleed a white edge may appear when the job is trimmed to final size. Please allow a minimum of 3mm bleed on all edges on all jobs.
Here are a few tips to follow to help make your life (and ours) easier... - All colours to be CMYK, no Pantone Colours or RGB / HSV / INDEX COLOUR files. Note: Pantone colours may be required for spot colour offset jobs. (spot silver jobs include panton 877c)
- Check your specified colours against the CMYK Colour chart. Screen colours generally don’t match or give a true reflection of what will print.
- Convert all fonts to paths or curves if possible - or supply all fonts used
- All pictures need to be 300dpi at actual size for maximum quality, any bigger it’s a waste of space, any smaller the quality drops!
Text & Graphic Formats - Text: ASCII, MicroSoft Word, RTF, Plain Text or similar is preferable
- Graphics: For scanned Photos & Logos (Bitmap Graphics)
- Photos: 300dpi at 100% full size saved as TIFF, EPS or JPEG (high quality setting)
- Logos: 600dpi at 100% full size saved as TIFF or EPS (high quality setting)
NOTE: Images off Web Pages are NOT generally acceptable quality. Either check them in the appropriate software, or let us have a look if you’re unsure.
All jobs and/or logos are to be supplied with a Colour (preferable) or Black & White print out if possible for our reference.
We work with PDF's.
Click the following link to download some of the templates available for setting your artwork up on so you can correctly supply a pdf and save time and money!
Files like .tif, .eps, .ai, .indd... etc....
INDESIGN - great to use as a preflight program before exporting to PDF.
PHOTOSHOP - CMYK is good... RGB is bad. Leaving layers unflattened lets us alter your file, but font issues can occur.
ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR - Can be imported into the adobe suite.
If you are working in a SIGNWRITING PROGRAM then the same applies, export as an eps or an ai file (even a tiff, but make sure it is CMYK and check the colour values, RGB files will only cause headaches).
Please check for viruses before supplying files.
- USB drives
- Compact Disks; PhotoCD or writable CDs (CD-R, CD-RW or DVD-R) in Mac or Windows format
* Alternatively your files can be sent via email. Please consider download time with large file sizes - using Stuffit or ZIPing the files may be an option or for larger files you can send them via
wetransfer.com (this is a free website application).
