Help - Artwork

ARTWORK PREPARATION GUIDES

There are extensive artwork preparation guides for nearly all products. When you are on a product page (a page where you can work out prices) look on the right hand side, near the top. You will see a big icon "Artwork Preparation". Click on that, or the link below to view the artwork preparation guide for that product. If you need help with that, just ask the helpdesk.

BLEEDS

One of the topics that we get asked about most frequently is "bleeds". A bleed is an "extra bit" of artwork that extends past the edge of your design and is usually expressed in millimetres, i.e. "2mm bleed". The bleed area normally contains part of the background images and colour. In the example below, the crop marks (small black lines at right angles to each other) show where the trim line will be and the pink transparent border shows the bleed area.

Why are bleeds necessary? We print on large sheets of paper with multiple sets of artwork “imposed” on each sheet. These then need to be cut up on a large guillotine and may go on for further finishing. Very slight variations in the positioning of your job on a sheet may creep in during the printing and finishing processes. For instance, we might get paper “stretch” on a litho print or paper shrinkage on a digital job. Now imagine a leaflet with a solid blue colour all the way around the edge. Without bleeds, your eye would be drawn to a white line on one or two edges. Your eye will pick up even fractions of a millimetre! With bleeds you get blue solid colour all the way around.

How much bleed? We recommend that you supply artwork to us with 2mm bleed all the way around.

How do I create bleeds? This depends on which application you are using to create the artwork. If the application "understands" about bleeds, then there will be a write up in the manual or or a section of the help facility. If you are using an application that was not designed to print from, i.e. Microsoft Word, then you will need to "cheat"! A trick that works for most word processors, i.e. OpenOffice Writer and Microsoft Word is to create a page size that equals the desired page size PLUS bleeds.

Here's an example of how to do this in OpenOffice Writer. We are going to make the page size 2mm wider all round than the finished size in order to make the bleeds.

• Set the page size. Go to Format > Page, select the Page tab and then select User as the Format. You can then override the height and width sizes. For example, if I want an A5 (finished size 210x148mm) I input sizes of 21.40cm and 15.20cm.
• Set the Paper Size. This depends on how you're going to create your PDF. In OpenOffice writer, you would simply use File > Export As PDF... and that will take care of the paper size automatically for you. However, if you are using a PDF writer, then you may need to set the page size explicitly. Here's an example of how to do that in CutePDF. Open up the printer Properties (normally, File > Print.. and then click the Properties button) and then click on the Advanced... button. At the Paper Size: option, select "Postscript Custom Page Size". You may have to scroll down to see this option. You will then be able to input the exact Paper Size that you want, in our example that is 214 and 152mm for A5 plus 2mm bleed all round.

If all else fails, then we can enlarge your pages for you to make bleeds. You'll need to ask the helpdesk for assistance with this and currently you must select "manual proofing" (not automatic proofing) when you place your order. Of course, you will need to make sure that text and any images that you don't want cut into are quite a long way from the edge for this to work. We enlarge the artwork to create the bleed and your text ends up closer to the edge, which is crude but effective!

COMBINING (MERGING) PDFs

If your artwork is split over multiple PDFs, but the artwork preparation guide says to submit only one file, what should you do? One simple solutions is to merge the PDFs. If you have the full version of Acrobat (not Reader), then use that to merge the files. Otherwise there are upteen free utilities on the internet that allow you to merge PDF files, just google it. One of the best that we have seen is pdfsam (PDF Split And Merge) from:

www.pdfsam.org

Just download this and it takes seconds to merge your PDF files.

COLOUR?

All of our printing equipment (lithographic, digital and large format) is computer controlled and calibrated to a pleasing colour balance. If you are using correctly calibrated desk top publishing software (i.e. Quark or InDesign) and display hardware, the colours you see on your screen should be a reasonably close representation of the final printed product. Otherwise, you will find that the colour corrected proof that we send you will be closer to the final printed item - although the type and configuration of your display monitor will limit how close this match is.

We are sometimes asked whether you can send in a previously printed sample to "match". Unfortunately, we can't do this at these prices. Most times your job will be "batched" (or "ganged" as the American printers call it) with other customer's jobs. Either your job was printed right last time or not. Sending us a hardcopy won't help as we can't alter the whole print run, or this would effect everyone else's colours!

DESIGN?

The web site prices are from your print-ready electronic original and do not include any design work, or manipulation of your files. We do offer a graphic design service, including book covers, newsletter and brochure design, folder design and much more. Please contact the helpdesk for a quotation.

FILE FORMATS

Please read the artwork preparation guide for the product that you are going to order, this will give you details. In general, you should always supply your artwork as a PDF file. For the vast majority of cases, this will result the fastest file processing and most accurate printing. We can accept many other formats, but please note that there will be a file handling charge and your proof will take longer to generate. If you don't have a method of creating a PDF, please read the section below.

If you do not have PDF creation software, you can create PDF files by downloading a free PDF Writer utility, just google for this. We find that CutePDF from the nice folks at Acro Software Inc. is very good.  The standard version of this software is completely free to use and you can upgrade to the "Pro" version if you need extra features.   Many of our customers use this and we even use it ourselves on PCs without an Acrobat licence. There are clear instructions on their web site, please follow them!   Here is the link to web site for CutePDF:

http://www.cutepdf.com

Other file formats that we can accept (see note above about file handling charges):

InDesign†
Illustrator†
Photoshop†
All Microsoft Office documents up to Office 2007*
Microsoft Publisher (to 2003)††
TIFF‡
JPEG‡

‡TIFFs and JPEGS are only suitable for small items such as leaflets or flyers up to A4 size. They are NOT suitable for booklets or books! Make sure that they are at 300dpi. For JPEGs, make sure that you use a "high" or "highest" quality setting. There is no extra charge for supplying your artwork as a TIFF or JPEG, but you cannot use automatic soft proofing with these formats, so it's worth converting them to PDFs.

† Version restrictions apply.

* Microsoft Office applications are not designed for commercial printing, and we recommend that more complex documents are created in a Desk Top Publishing application. We can create artwork for you if needed, please call the helpdesk to discuss this. Some Microsoft Office applications are really not print friendly - these include Powerpoint and Excel and we will make a charge if these need to be turned into something that we can print from. Please ask if in doubt - the advice is free.

††Some notes on Publisher. You should be aware that Publisher is not a "stable" format, i.e. we have no way of knowing whether all of the fonts, images etc., within your file are correct or not. For this reason it is always recommended that you create a PDF from your Publisher file as you are then certain that what you see in the PDF is what you send us!

If you do not have PDF creation software, you can create PDF files from Publisher in a couple of different ways:-

Download a PDF Writer utility. See the notes above for more information on this.

Alternatively, you can follow the instructions in this Microsoft technical note:-

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F1FC413C-6D89-4F15-991B-63B07BA5F2E5&displaylang=en

Please note that Publisher does have a pretty big "feature" with transparencies (apparently this is not a bug!) that mainly affects GIF and PNGs. Basically Publisher will create PDFs with many thousands of 1px by 1px images. This will make your computer run very slow and it causes major pre-press problems for us. The way to fix this is to delete the offending images, remove the transparency on the original image files (i.e. in an image editing application) and then import them again into Publisher.

PROOFS

Please always read the artwork preparation guide for the product you are ordering. This will save you a lot of time!

Useful terms: "artwork" - the electronic files that you upload for us to print. "proof" - the prepared file that you check and approve before we schedule the job to print.

What is proofing? Once you have uploaded your artwork to us, there are several stages to proofing.

• File preparation. We correct any “fixable” mistakes in your artwork and prepare it for print. This involves converting any RGB colours in your file to CMYK, so that you have a more accurate view of what the final item will look like.
• Report creation. If there are mistakes that can't be fixed that are show stoppers, we can't prepare a proof. These are shown as errors in your report. In addition, there may be warnings. These are things that won't stop us printing, but that we think you might want to check. This report will be emailed to you (as an enote, so it's stored online as well).
• Proof creation. Most people opt for a soft proof, but you can also request a hard copy proof for most products. A soft proof is a specially prepared PDF that you view online.

When do I see a proof? If you have selected an automatic soft proof, the proofing process should be over within a few minutes. You will get an email from us that contains your report. If a proof has been generated, you can view and approve or reject your proof through your admin > proofs area of the web site. Please note that autoproofing is not available for all products, or for custom quotations. If automatic soft proofing is not available as an option, then the default will be a manually processed soft proof. If you have selected a manually processed soft proof, then this will normally be processed within 4 working hours. During our busy periods, this may take longer. You will get an email from us once the artwork has been processed that contains your report. If a proof has been generated, you can view and approve or reject your proof through your admin > proofs area of the web site. If you have requested a hard copy proof, you will still get a report and manually prepared soft proof, but please do not approve this until you have received and examined your hard copy proof. We will normally send out a hard copy proof within 1-2 working days via first class post.

Is there a charge if I need to resubmit my artwork and get another proof? If you have selected automatic soft proofing, there is absolutely no charge. For each extra manually processed soft proof we charge £5 and extra hard copy proofs are charged at the same rate as the original hard copy proof.

SENDING ARTWORK

Before you can send us your artwork, you will need to register on the web site and place an order. As part of the order process, you upload your artwork. If you miss this step, or you need to upload new artwork, log on to the web site and go to ADMIN > UPLOADS and use the upload facility there. Please do not email us artwork!

Once you have uploaded artwork, we will prepare a proof for you (see the proof section on this page for more details).

STORAGE - OF ARTWORK

We do not keep your artwork indefinitely!

If we create artwork for you then we will store it for a minimum of 12 months. We do not guarantee the safe storage of your artwork. Inky will always give you a copy of your artwork. If you pay for it, it's yours and we recommend that you store it safely.

If you upload your own artwork for a job then we do not guarantee to store your artwork at all once a job has been printed. We have taken no payment for storing your artwork and take no responsibility for storing it. If you request a reprint of a previous job, we will use previously submitted artwork if this is still available, otherwise you will have to send us the artwork again.