Print isn’t completely dead and for those designers that are working on print projects, there are guidelines that need to be followed. In this video, I cover all the bases when it comes to sending your files to a printer so that your projects can look as good as how you’ve designed them!
Why do we still care about print?
There’s always that one class in school that no one ever pays attention to and that class was probably print production.
“Print is dead, everyone is going digital.”
I feel like I’ve heard this since the beginning of my career and we’re still printing things. There are projects that are hard to eliminate because we experience printed things very differently than digital.
Let’s say you’re throwing an event, you’re probably going to need some signage.
Packaging… ALL packaging is printed. Here is the cover of the EPA manual.
There’s this ghost deboss on the cover of the case. Something like this is only possible in print. You can replicate the effect in a digital capacity, but you don’t get the tactility. You can’t help but touch things when they’re printed like this.
Weddings! Weddings are a formal occasion and a printed invite feels special. I designed my sister’s wedding invitations, which was also my gift to her and my brother-in-law for their wedding. (Side note, designing and printing invitations is nice gift, but the real gift is giving the bride one less thing to do!)
I wanted the printing for this to be substantial, so I went with a heavy 200# cover stock.
The border is printed with a gold foil. The difference between printing with gold foil vs. a gold ink, is that when shown in the light, the shade of gold changes, which gives it some character. The text was pretty simple, so I had it letter pressed.
This is something you want to hold and touch. It also sets an expectation for what kind of wedding your guests will be attending.
There is no way I could’ve designed something like this if I didn’t have an understanding, or in this case, a more advanced understanding, of print production.
Vocabulary
So you can actually understand what I’m talking about, here is a list of terms.
Pre-flighting in print is the process of checking your files before sending them to a printer. The term comes from Pilots having a pre-flight procedure before take off.
Here is a layout I made for reference:
Trim is your page size.
Bleed are the elements that extend past your trim size.
Have you ever tried to print elements to the edge, but it always comes out with a border? The reason is that normal printers don’t go edge to edge.
How bleed works is that the image or elements extend a little bit past the edge and then the paper is cut down to the correct size, leaving you with a full bleed design.
When pages are being cut down, they shift slightly and there comes a margin of error for that. Because of this, printers provide what is called safety.
Safety is an imaginary margin on your page to keep any elements from being cut off. This mostly applies to text because if it gets cut off, it can become unreadable.
The best way to prevent issues with safety is to have your margins larger than the specs and keep all of your text elements within the margins.
Similar to safety, we also have a gutter for when you have spreads.
Gutter is the imaginary margin on the inside edge of your page. Because of the binding in a book or magazine, elements are pushed in quite a bit to avoid anything falling into the gutter.
So those are the elements that are physically part of your page, now onto the technical specs when it comes to text and image.
Everything lives in a color space, which till be RGB or CMYK.
CMYK is the color space you need to be in for anything print, which stands for Cyan Magenta Yellow, and Black.
This always brings up the question, why is Black K? K stands for key color and the key color is black. I don’t control these things. People were weird back then.
RGB is the color space for anything digital, which stands for Red, Green, and Blue.
For images, we also have to pay attention to resolution, which is the quality of your image.
Resolution is defined in DPI or dots per inch. The high-res requirement for print is 300DPI.
Use the correct program!
Your design must be created in Adobe InDesign to do this. If you use another program like Photoshop or Illustrator, you will not be able to preflight it correctly for print. One of my designers didn’t listen to me about this. She did her entire layout in Illustrator. It was sent to the client digitally and it was approved. Since she could pre-flight properly, the printer wouldn’t accept the file, so she had to redo the entire thing.
Do yourself a favor and just do it correctly from the beginning. If you’re new to InDesign, I do have a tutorial for beginners you can check out. If you prefer video, I have a video on my YouTube channel here.
Pre-Flight Process
1. Check your trim size.
2. Also, check that you’ve set a bleed size in your document settings
3. For elements that are on the edge of your trim size, do they extend to the bleed size?
4. Do you have safety specs from your printer? If your margins are large enough, you should be ok!
5. Are all of your text color(s) in CMYK?
6. Is the effective PPI for your images above 300? If not, you’ll have to scale down the size until you reach 300, or try to come close. I highly suggest not going below 250 DPI.
7. Are your images in CMYK? If not, you’ll have to switch their color mode in Photoshop. Open the image in Photoshop. At the top, go to Image > Mode, then select CMYK.
8. If everything above is done, you can export your project. This should be a PDF X-1a, with crops and bleed marks.
9. Send your project to the printer!
10. Pray there are no errors. Your printer will let you know.
11. Go through this checklist until it become second nature to you!
Conclusion
Just for you I created a Guide to Print Production for download. Use it for reference and a checklist!
Printers will let you know if there’s something wrong with your PDF. However, if you follow the steps above exactly, it should reduce the back and forth and save you on time.
What did you learn from this post? Are there more things you’d like me to explain further? What kinds of print projects are you currently working on?
Leave me a comment below and keep on creating!
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