print tips

Our collection of handy tips gathered over the years.

- When printing a label, specify overglossing to seal in the ink/improve rub resistance

- If the ink bleeds off the trimmed pages of your design add 3 to 5mm for bleed to your design

- Never impose a page without phoning the printer first to check how he planned the job at quoting stage

- Don't start designing a job in any software program before phoning the printer to see if he can use that brand of software

- Be careful if you specify gold foil on a letterhead. It will usually melt in a laser printer. Specify Laser grade foil

- GIF's are too low in resolution for commercial printing. As a general rule scan at 2400dpi for printing and save it as a TIFF

- High-speed lasers can melt the ink on your logo on your nice letterhead. Printers can obtain special inks but they need to know before the job is printed, not after! These inks need 48 hours to dry before you start high-speed lasering

- If you are designing an A4 brochure that needs to be folded to DLE, the front cover panel should be 99mm, the middle panel 98mm and the back panel 97mm

- Covers of menus, books etc that have frequent handling should be overglossed or laminated to avoid finger prints all over the job

- If you are supplying a disk, always supply a laser print of what's on it. This is so we can check the file for any missing elements using your laser print as a reference guide

- Don't email a 50-megabyte file. It takes too long and jams up both your computer and ours. Phone us and we will collect your disk or arrange a courier

- Any book/magazine with more than about 12 pages may need modification to allow for "creep". That is when the pages are folded to form the magazine, pages closest to the middle tend to protrude out more and more. You need to factor this in to each set of pages. As a guide, allow 0.5mm creep per page set. Adjust your trims to suit

- Never use a colour laser print, photocopy or budget priced inkjet copy as a final colour proof if you are fussy about how the final printed job should look. In spite of what copier manufacturers may tell you, few, if any of these machines can simulate what the final print colours will be.

- You can help minimize file problems by deleting all old files and any unneeded information from the disk

- Make sure each file has a different name (We know of one weird incident when a client gave two photos the same name. On the computer screen it showed correctly, but on the printing plate the other one appeared as if from nowhere)

- All artwork will take twice as long to prepare as you think