First of all use the Adobe Indesign or Quarkxpress desktop publishing packages if you want professional quality printing. Microsoft Word is just not designed for the job. Word it is meant for printing from your home computer. It does not have the tools that you will require to make your artwork look good when printed on a litho offset printing press. If you have no other choice the only thing to do is save it as a PDF and keep your fingers crossed.
If you do not have Adobe Indesign or Quarkxpress then second best option would be Adobe Illustrator. Third best is Adobe Photoshop. It is called Photoshop because it is designed for photo manipulation rather than laying out designs or detailed text work.
How to Prepare Your Artwork For Printing –
- Make sure all photos and illustrations are a minimum of 300 dots per square inch in size. Less that this and you may get pixelation.
- Ensure that everything is saved as CMYK colours and not RGB. If you use RGB the colours will look different when printed.
- Ideally keep your text 10mm from the edge of the sheet of paper and a minimum of 5mm. Anything less will not look nice when printed.
- If you want a folded leaflet get one someone has already done and copy where they have put the folds. This is because some folds are not where people expect them to be. For example, a wrap fold is done (left to right) at 98mm, 99mm, 100mm and not 99mm, 99mm, 99mm.
- Don’t put colour background panels ending exactly on a fold. This is because during folding it can move by a millimeter either way causing it to have white or coloured lines on adjoining pages.
- Make sure your artwork has a 3mm bleed extending over the edge of the finished cut size.
- When you save your artwork as a PDF make sure you select crop marks, blead marked and colour bars. These will then be added to your finished PDF. Your printer will need these to cut the job to the finished size after it is printed. The colour bar is there to cheque the colour balance is correct during the print run.
If you would like a quotation for your design or printing work please call today on 01646 68676, We would be happy to take what you have produced and quote for finishing it off and printing or just doing the design work for you.
