You have spent weeks, maybe even months, perfecting your new company brochure. The design is sharp. The copy is compelling and persuasive. Every element on your computer screen looks absolutely brilliant. You feel a sense of pride as you export the file. You confidently send it to us for printing. Then, your phone rings. It is your friendly printer on the other end. We have a small query about the artwork file. This is a moment that can cause a little heart-sink for any designer.
We see it all the time, and it is nothing to worry about. A few small technical errors can delay a project. They can sometimes affect the final printed quality. But these issues are very common. They are also simple to correct once you know what to look for. Our goal is the same as yours. We want your print to be perfect and to make you look great. Let us walk through the most frequent problems we encounter. This guide will save you time, money, and a whole lot of bother.
The Case of the Missing Bleed
This is without a doubt the most common artwork issue we see. What on earth is bleed? The best way to think about it is as a safety margin for your design. When we print your job, it is usually placed on a large sheet with many others. We then trim the sheet down to the correct final size. A massive industrial guillotine cuts through a thick stack of paper. This process is incredibly precise, but the stack can shift by a tiny fraction of a millimetre.
If your design stops exactly at the edge, this tiny shift can become a big problem. It can leave a thin, unprofessional-looking white line on one side of your finished item. Bleed prevents this. You simply extend your background colour or image beyond the final trim line. We recommend a 3mm bleed on all edges. Think of it like colouring slightly over the lines on purpose. This gives the guillotine a necessary tolerance area. For example, on a business card with a solid blue background, that blue should extend 3mm past the card’s final dimensions on every side. It guarantees a flawless, edge-to-edge finish.
The RGB vs CMYK Colour Clash
Your leaflet design looks wonderfully vibrant on your monitor. But when the printed version arrives, the colours seem a bit dull or different. Why does this happen? The reason is a classic mix-up between two different colour models. Your computer screen, phone, and television all use RGB. This stands for Red, Green, and Blue. They work by mixing light to create the spectrum of colours you perceive. More light results in brighter colours. This is an additive process.
Printing presses, however, do not use light to create colour. They use ink. We use a model called CMYK. This stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key (which is Black). This is a subtractive process. As ink is added to white paper, it absorbs, or subtracts, light. The RGB model can create certain colours, like electric blues and neon greens, that are simply outside the achievable range of CMYK inks. Designing in RGB for print is like writing a song in French and expecting the sheet music to appear in German. The core message is there, but the nuance is lost in translation. The fix is simple. Always set your document’s colour mode to CMYK before you start designing. This gives you a much more accurate preview of the final printed colours from the very beginning.
The Resolution Riddle
Another frequent hiccup involves the quality of images and logos. You have a great picture of your team for the annual report. It looks perfectly fine on your website, so you copy and paste it into your print design. The result, however, comes back looking blurry and pixelated. This frustrating problem is all about resolution. The resolution required for a screen is much lower than what is needed for high-quality print.
We measure print resolution in DPI, or dots per inch. For a crisp, professional print, all images need to be 300 DPI at the size they are being used. Most images saved from websites are only 72 DPI. They contain far less visual data. When you try to print them, the printer has to guess the missing information. This leads to that blocky, fuzzy appearance. Always use the original, high-resolution photographs for your print files. A great tip is to zoom into your image at 100% on your screen. If it looks pixelated there, it will look even worse in print. For logos, always use a vector file (.ai, .eps, or .svg) if possible. Vectors are built with maths, not pixels, and can be scaled to any size without losing quality.