Why We Need to Check your Own Artwork before Printing – DIY Artwork

If you are fortunate enough to have the talent to provide your own artwork for promotional purposes or indeed for any other print-based requirements, then you possibly know a little about the needs of the printers in terms of format and file size. If you don’t have this prior knowledge then you might be wondering just why it is that we need time to check over the artwork which you’re providing; the fact is that it’s a pretty technical task and things need to be correct right from the very beginning of the process so that the finished result is as good as your original work in terms of colour, resolution, and clarity.

Providing artwork for promotional purposes is one thing but when you’ve prepared that artwork yourself, there are various issues that you’ll need to sort out in order to ensure that the artwork is in the right state for us to print it in the best possible quality. We need to check your artwork to make sure that it fits in with the standards necessary for high-resolution images.

Designing for the web is very different from designing for print; items that are to be printed such as business cards, posters, and flyers or other promotional items such as pens, caps, and mugs. Web-based images need only be 72 DPI (Dots Per Inch) but printed media needs to be much higher…300 DPI is the standard.

If you are providing us with digital artwork for printing, then the following guidelines should help you to make sure that when we do check it, we don’t need to come back to you for adjustments…wasting your precious time with changes that could have been in place from the start isn’t what we want to do. We want to make your experience as simple and as fruitful as possible.

There are two distinct types of digital images; these are Vector images and Raster images. Vector images are often used for logos or sometimes for line-drawn graphics and these may be easily enlarged or shrunk without losing any clarity or resolution…they’re good for print purposes. Other images such as jpegs and photography from digital cameras are Raster images and these are often poor quality when they’re rendered in print because the number of pixels in the image cannot change when it’s printed out no matter if you change it on the page…it remains the same which means it appears blurred more often than not. When you’re providing Raster images for printing, they should be a minimum of 300 DPI or they simply won’t work…not in print anyway!

Providing artwork in the right format is extremely important in order that we can easily provide you with the highest quality of print possible. Your designs and your marketing materials need to be well put together in order that your company is well represented and the best way to achieve this is to make sure your artwork is print-ready before it gets to the printing stage.

We hope this guide has been of some value… employ the design experts … call us on 01538 750 538