Supplying Artwork

Once you have placed an order you will receive a confirmation email which contains details of how to supply us your artwork by email.

In order for your product to be perfect, it is vital that we receive your artwork accurately! Please read our guide below to ensure that what you supply us with is 100% correct.

Artwork should preferably be supplied as press ready PDFs with 3mm bleed and simple crop marks.

Note: Please submit native files to us for all artwork that contains SPOT colours, cutter guides, use of foil blocking etc. PDFs are often not possible in these cases since cutters etc cannot easily be extracted or corrected.

A Mac workstation

PDF

A press ready PDF is a document created on a high enough quality setting to print from. We recommend using the standard or professional editions of adobe acrobat which are available from www.adobe.com.

Please ensure that when you create your PDF that you manually select print and choose the 'press quality' setting. This is especially important when creating documents on the PC, and when converting Microsoft documents to PDF.

Where possible when creating your PDF from programs such as Quark Express, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Indesign etc please include crop marks, these should only be outer corner marks and not full colour bars etc. Also make sure the crop marks are outset by 6 point so they do not touch the cut size of the document.

As always please include bleed (Unless your design doesn't bleed).

Other Formats

Quark Xpress

This is our preferred format after PDF. It can come from a PC or a Mac and may contain Illustrator and/or Photoshop EPS files amongst the other formats. Please try to ensure that you are clear on how to set up the colours in your document (i.e. is it four colours, specials etc?). For more information on Quark please visit www.quark.com.

Adobe Illustrator

Illustrator is widely used by our designers. However please try to provide the EPS files to us, placed into a correctly sized Quark Express document. If you do not have Quark you may just send them straight to us. Again, observe colour setup in Illustrator as it may be misleading and can cause problems. For more information on Illustrator please visit www.adobe.com.

Adobe Photoshop

If all or part of your artwork has been created in Photoshop please try to save it into a Photoshop EPS file and place it into Quark XPress. If you have text in your Photoshop file, then the print quality of this text can be greatly increased by ticking the 'include vector data' check box in the EPS save dialogue. (This option is only available in Photoshop version 6 or greater). For more information on Photoshop please visit www.adobe.com

Microsoft

We welcome all the major Microsoft formats and you can specify whether you wish to have the job printed in full colour or otherwise. For more information please visit www.microsoft.com/office.

If you can convert your artwork to a PDF at your end then please make sure you manually select 'print' under the 'file' menu, choose 'properties' and then choose 'Press Quality'. PDFs created with the default quality settings will not translate properly and cannot be accepted. Acrobat version 7 or later should be used as previous versions do not convert RGB images to CMYK correctly when using the default colour settings.

Applications and Fonts

  • QuarkXpress, Illustrator, Photoshop. PDF files should be print optimized (300 dpi images) all fonts embedded. (Choose press quality when writing your PDF on a PC)
  • Word, Publisher, Excel and PowerPoint files are accepted.
  • Please outline all fonts if supplying an illustrator or freehand eps.

Colour

  • All artwork needs to be CMYK or greyscale unless your job is a 1/2/3 colour Pantone® based one. Please convert RGB images to CMYK before submitting.
  • Standard four-color printing process is used plus specials.
  • Pantone® colours that are present in CMYK jobs will be converted to process (CMYK). Unless otherwise specified by you.

Scans and Images

  • All colour images should be CMYK colour mode.
  • Scanned or bitmapped images should be 300 dpi.
  • Images that are intended to be printed in a spot (Pantone®) colour should be made to monotone in Photoshop first.

Final Files

  • Quark PC files are accepted or as print optimized PDF files. (Choose press quality)
  • Include all fonts, postscript screen fonts and printer fonts if not supplying PDF.
  • All files MUST include all fonts and images used in the document as these are not imbedded into the Quark document. (This is the case for both PC and Mac).