Design for print.

Design for print.

Here at Apple Print Ltd we spend quite a bit of time making sure the files supplied by our clients are going to produce a quality product. There are challenges that make this difficult but we find that just communicating, from time to time, the kind off issues we face the most can limit the impact of these issues on both the printed product and the timescale of the job.

RGB - The RGB colour model is an additive colour model in which red, green, and blue light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colours. The name of the model comes from the initials of the three additive primary colours, red, green, and blue. Our Apogee Pre-press can convert these colours to CMYK (the standard printing process colours) but these can be washed out by the conversion colour profile used. What’s best is if you are going to have something printed, Digital, Litho or large format, is to double check everything is converted to CMYK in the native programme before PDF’ing or sending to print. With this in mind if you do provide us with collected Indesign or Quark files we can sort these issues for you, it just may add some time to a job as we’d have to re-proof. Other creative programmes have the same issue like Word and Publisher, and we expect in these cases the files won’t be converted because they are not professional design applications, the issue is that if MS programmes are used and then PDF’ed we won’t find the RGB until we rip, again not a great issue but it all adds time to a project.

IMAGES – While making sure images are CMYK another thing that can be quite upsetting in a beautifully designed job is LOW RES IMAGES. Once again if you are not an expert we understand how this happens but unless an image is 300DPI at the size it’s to be used it can end up looking fuzzy. It needs to be understood that if you grab images / logos and bits like that off a web site then more than likely they are going to be 75dpi and whilst they’ll look great on a website they will look beyond awful when printed in hi-res – just contact us, chuck us a file and we’ll check it out for you.

BLEED - Bleed is a printing term that refers to printing that goes beyond the edge of the sheet after trimming. The bleed is the part on the side of a document that gives the printer a small amount of space to account for movement of the paper, and design inconsistencies. Bleed ensures that no unprinted edges occur in the final trimmed document. This is very important if you have images / text close to the edge of the sheet and helps us to make sure we don’t have trimming issues and also on digital where we can get small 0.5mm movements when printing.

So just to re-cap here are a few helpful terms:

BLEED - Extended areas that extend beyond the ‘trim’ or the final finished size of the page. Without a bleed, we will find it near impossible to finish a job accurately and white edges may show where the pages are cut.

CMYK - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (black). Printing requires this colour mode to create superior printing to that using RGB (Red, Green, Blue). Many digital cameras produce RGB JPGs which we will happily convert for you, but you will need to check you are happy with the colour conversion.

DPI - Dots Per Inch refers to the number of dots produced by a printer.

EPS - Encapsulated Postscript. These can easily be re-scaled without loss of detail. JPEG Joint Photo graphics Experts Group. JPEGs compress the file size, which means it is crucial to ensure

images are set at 300dpi or higher.

PDF - Portable Document Format. This is the most popular file type for transferring files between computers, regardless of their systems (ie PC to Mac).

TIFF - Tagged Image File Format. It is cross-platform compatible and retains better image quality than a JPEG.

Vector - These images are defined by mathematical formulae rather than built from pixels. This means they can be reproduced at any size without degeneration in image quality.

You can find this info HERE on our website and you can always call our studio on 01635 521654 if you have any questions.

So we are in full swing preparing for our 25^th Birthday Party on the 11^th of Aug, if you would like to come then please just drop Elle an email and let her know you wish to attend – click HERE for more details.  Also please all check out http://www.projectcolombo.com/ this great idea is being supported by a great client of ours and we hope we can support them with this worthy cause - @StrandUK on Twitter to also learn more about them and their business.