How To Prepare Your Design For Print

If the design is not up to the mark and up to clients requirements then believe me you are doing it all wrong. You invest a huge amount of effort, time and resources in getting your designs right. So the last thing you want is bad quality.

Before printing anything out you need to make sure of these 5 things which every creative needs to know about print design.


1. The difference between RGB and CMYK

The system that your computer software uses for generating colour on screen is not the same system that printers use. RGB colour system, which is made up of red, green and blue. But printers work with the cyan, magenta, yellow and black colour set – commonly referred to as CMYK.

The RGB system has a greater range of colours than most printers can reproduce. If your designs are intended for digital only, you need your software set to RGB. If it’s for print, you must use CMYK.

2. The importance of resolution

Resolution is not an issue when you’re working on a web but when it comes to printing, you need some high resolution files or your prints will come out blurry.
For printing, the most important measure you need to worry about is DPI: dots per inch. As the name suggests, this determines the number of dots your printer will create on one square inch of your printed page.

The best practice is to set your software to the maximum DPI of 300. There’s no benefit to going any higher, and it will just make your file larger and more unwieldy.


3. How your design scales

When you look at your design on the screen, it may look perfect. But if it’s going to be printed at a much bigger size (such as a poster or billboard) or a dramatically smaller one (such as a business card), you need to consider how well the different elements of your design will scale.

One of the most important aspects of that is typography. So to make sure the text on a business card is legible, for example, it’s best to avoid light and thin fonts. Also, don’t set the size so small that people won’t be able to read it when it’s printed.

4. The need for bleed

The way a printer cuts the paper down is not an exact science, so designers have always left a little room around the edge of their designs as room for error. This is called bleed, and all good design software will include guides to show you where the bleed starts and finishes. Different printers will require different amounts of bleed.


5. The importance of proofreading

One of the biggest pitfalls of printing your designs in physical form is making silly mistakes. Because unlike the web, you can’t go back to correct it. If it’s wrong, you’ve simply wasted your money.

Obviously you should spell check your work, but spell checking will only get you 75 per cent of the way there. It won’t pick up on many grammatical mistakes, it won’t notice if you misspell proper nouns such as company names, and it won’t know if you’ve used the wrong homophone – such as ‘you’re’ when you should have used ‘your’ (or their/there, it’s/its, and so on).

So you need to ensure that you do not do Typos.

These are just the very basics of what you need to know about printing your designs. For more information and getting a design down contact us on: wwwtruecolours.pk

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