In printing, your designs are usually printed on a sheet larger than the finished size of your item, often multiple copies on single large sheet. Including crop marks in your design lets us know exactly at what dimensions you would like it cut. You may think this would be obvious based on the dimensions of your file, but any design with elements that reach the edge of the page need to include bleeds and crops.

When parts of your design extend right to the edge of your printed item, this is called a bleed and the design should actually extend or “bleed” past where the item will be “cropped” or trimmed by at least 1/8 inch (0.125 inch). For example a standard business card of 3.5”x2” with bleeds would become a 3.75”x2.25” design with crops at the 3.5”x2” dimensions. By extending your design past where it will be cut, it will ensure ink coverage will go to the very edge of your printed item. It is also a good idea to keep important elements (such as text you do not want to extend off the page) at least 1/8 inch inside of the crop area.

Unless you intend to print Pantone Spot Colours, we recommend that you submit files in CMYK. Printing uses the CMYK colour space. Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black inks or toners are mixed to produce all the colours you will see on the page.

RGB and Pantone Spot Colours will be converted to CMYK. Since some of these colours are not able to be reproduced accurately in CMYK, there may be colour shifts in your design, especially with brighter, vivid colours. Thus, we suggest converting to CMYK before you send us the files so you can see the resulting colour shifts in advance. Be sure to keep your RGB originals on hand for future use as some colour is lost in the conversion CMYK.

If you would like to use Pantone Spot Colours, then be sure to leave the spot colours in your file and ensure that we are aware you would like spot colours used.

Images should ideally be 300 dpi at the desired print size.
Anything smaller will start to look pixelated or fuzzy, though many people are satisfied with print quality resolutions as low as 150 – 200 dpi.
For example, an image to fill a 4×6 postcard including bleeds should be 4.25” x 300 pixels by 6.25” x 300 pixels (accounting for bleeds).
Thus, the optimal image size for a 4×6 postcard with bleeds would be 1275×1875 pixels. Anything larger is OK, but makes the file larger and does not improve finished print quality.
Be sure to keep a copy of your source image at the highest resolution you have for future use.
Most images pulled from a website will look much worse on paper than they do on your screen as most screens have roughly 1/4 the resolution that a printed page has.

For most jobs, the preferred file format is a PDF that is compliant with the PDFX1a standard. PDFX1a will flatten transparencies, convert RGB to CMYK, embed all fonts used and downsample large images to 300dpi. It removes most issues that can lead to printing problems. If your software supports PDF but not PDFX1a, then the best quality option with fonts embedded will suffice.
If you are sending us a design that we will be modifying for you or referencing frequently (such as a business card template) we prefer native working files with all associated links and fonts.
We currently support the following native file formats:
Adobe Creative Suite 6 – InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat (if using Creative Cloud, please save/export CS6 compatible files)
QuarkXPress 8
Microsoft Office 2010 (pdf preferred to avoid font/page setup changes)
Standard image formats such as: TIFF, JPG, PNG, EPS
If you are unsure about the best way to submit a file, give us a call. We would be happy to suggest your best options for your given circumstances.