It’s Saturday afternoon, and my niece is playing around with a Photoshop document. Earlier, she’d convinced me to let her design a big collage poster of her favourite K-Pop band—an ambitious creative project worthy of any budding graphic designer.
Cutting to the chase, the end result wasn’t quite what was hoped for! Despite assuring me that she knew what she was doing, the A3 print plopped out with part of the image missing, and some unexpectedly pixelated areas. ‘Photoshop hates me’ lamented my small creative sidekick. She trundled off in disgust to make something with a phone app instead. (Give her time, she’ll be back).
However, this experience stayed with me as I’ve continued my design career. It’s fairly easy enough to put together something that works visually on screen (once you know how), but what happens if we need to print? We want the physical product to match the image we’ve lovingly created. We shouldn’t take potluck with the results – it’s a potential waste of time and resources.
As a marketing solutions agency, we’re often tasked with designing a number of varying projects for our clients. With some projects we’ll be given a comprehensive design brief and brand guidelines. But, with some others – details are left to be interpreted.
So, inspired by my ‘How to Print a K-Pop Poster’ guidelines, here are my top check-point tips that will help you, to help us with your next print project, by preparing your design work for print.
Preparing your design work for print
Lettering
Make sure that the fonts you use will appear clear and crisp; keep the font size above 8pts. Also remember that calligraphic and stylised fonts will need to be used at a larger size than standard fonts, if you want the text to be easily legible. This is even more important if the fancy text is imposed over an image (as opposed to a plain background).
Respect the Safe Area!
We don’t want precious details getting cut off at the edges. As a rule of thumb, having a 5mm border at your edges will allow for bleed and trim margins, ensuring your important content remains intact. It’s good to extend your background colour/pattern fully outwards into the bleed area - this will prevent any unsightly white edges appearing. However, you’ll want to keep all the important stuff (both text and imagery) in a protected focus area.
Portrait vs. Landscape.
When you’re ready to print, remember that a ‘portrait’ image (vertical rectangle; shorter top/bottom sides) will need printing in – of course – Portrait format, while a lengthways rectangular image will need to be printed in Landscape. If you’re sending your files off to a printing company, it’s likely that they’ll do a pre-print check – but it’s still good practice to be sure that your attached files match the print job requirements.
Filling the space with appropriately sized images.
Your design needs to proportionally fit the document size you wish to print at. If you have a lower resolution image that you want to print at A5 size, it may well work. But if you want the same image printing at A3 size, it’ll either float in the excess space – or if you blow it up to fit A3 dimensions, it will appear blurred and pixelated.
If we work together on social media management, we'll always make sure we're keeping a bank of suitable images for you to use in your marketing. So hopefully you'll never be short of new ideas.
CMYK vs RGB.
Certain differences are inevitable; printed paper won’t capture the vivid colours shown on screen. The RGB colour profile is perfect for digital designs, but you’ll need to use CMYK for printed items – or your print outs might unexpectedly differ from your on-screen creation.
It didn’t impress my niece of course, but here at Youbee Media marketing consultancy we’ve covered a wide range of print jobs – from exhibition stand backdrops and hardware decals through to business cards, training materials including workshops and (my favourite) branded booklets.
