Designing for print

Although much of our marketing these days is online most companies who run marketing campaigns run a combination of media from website and email to leaflets, brochures, posters and catalogues. Whilst many of the branding issues and design concepts will (or should!) follow through across all mediums, the production aspects are entirely different.

Designing for print is a skill in it’s own right. If you are planning to prepare your own artwork and send it to print there are a few things you should take into account.

Images

Make sure you include all image and graphic files imported into your document. Graphics that are missing may remain visible but will output in low resolution and look pixelated and fuzzy. All images should be supplied as CMYK not RGB and be a resolution of at least 300dpi. Although most printers will accept .jpg’s it’s good practice to supply images as .eps or .tiff files as the image quality is superior.

Fonts

Provide both printer and screen fonts. If printer fonts are missing your printer will not be able to create a proof or plates for your job.

Colours

Your images may print black and white or with inaccurate color if you don’t convert them to CMYK. Also some Pantone colors are outside of the CMYK color space and appear different when printed as process color. View your screen after conversion for a rough idea of how that color will appear. If you have Acrobat Professional check your final pdf files in print output for a good idea of what the final job will look like.

Bleed

Bleed is the bit where the ink runs off the edge of the page, for instance, if you have a large image that goes right to the edge. This is achieved by printing beyond the page size and then trimming to the
correct size. Make sure all bleeds extend at least 3mm beyond the edge of the size of the finished document but it’s best to check with your printer how much bleed they need as some may require more.

Binding

If you’re producing a booklet don’t forget to take into account the method of binding and think about how close to the binding edge text and images will be. You may need to allow a larger margin to accomodate and if you’re perfect binding and have an image that runs across the spread you may need to allow some overlap so that the image joins correctly.

Finally when you’ve got all the technical aspects right make sure you check and double-check copy, names, phone numbers, web addresses and page numbers. Reprinting a job means it will cost you twice as much and once ink is on paper you can’t change it like a website!