Five things to remember when designing for Online Digital Printing

At TradeDigitalPrint.co.uk many of our customers are designers or resell print to designers and other businesses. While working with so many creatives and industry professionals means that the standard of artwork we receive is consistently extremely high, mistakes or oversights in artwork can occur. If we spot an issue with artwork that might cause a problem we get in touch right away and often our customers tell us they were so wrapped up in the design process that they overlooked something simple. It’s easily done – especially when deadlines are tight.

To help our trade customers and based on the most common artwork oversights we find, we’ve put together a list of five things to check when supplying artwork for online digital printing:

1. Convert all colours to CMYK

It’s so easy to forget to convert the colour mode from RGB to CMYK in all your images and graphics. Often the images are originally in RGB and when placing a large number of pics it’s easy to overlook one. Of course, if there is an RGB image in your artwork, we’ll convert it for you but it may look different when printed to how you or your client saw it on screen.

2. Add bleed where necessary

Remember to add bleed when saving a pdf. Some packages like Microsoft, Powerpoint and Photoshop don’t let you add bleed when creating your pdf so you’ll have to make the document 3mm bigger all round before you export.

3. Don’t supply multi-page pdfs as spreads.

If you’re supplying a pdf for a multi-page document, make sure the pdf is in single pages with the front cover as page one, running to the back cover at the end of the document. Please don’t supply the pdf as spreads or reader’s pairs as then your artwork won’t be print-ready.

4. Check overprint settings – especially with white text

Please check your overprint settings as it’s not always obvious to the printer, especially with larger, multi-page documents. And always double check that your white text is not set to overprint. Overprint preview in Acrobat is great for letting you know which colours will overprint and which will not.

5. Don’t go too small with fonts

When designing for online digital printing we recommend you go no smaller than 7pt for jobs up to A3 size and 11pt for larger format artwork. Small text might look fine on screen but can be hard to read in print, especially if it’s not 100%  black.

If you’re new to supplying artwork for online digital printing or unsure about any element of your job, have a look at the support section on our website and if you need further help or advice, please contact our customer service team – we’re always happy to help. Register as a new customer with TradeDigitalPrint.co.uk to get a massive 50% off your first order as well as free delivery. All our trade customers get access to exclusive offers, immediate rewards and special trade deals. We guarantee the quality of both our print and our service so you have complete peace of mind that your print is in the hands of trusted professionals. To see our full range of products, get instant quotes or to upload artwork and order your print online, simply visit www.TradeDigitalPrint.co.uk or contact our experienced team of trade printers.