Print isn’t completely dead and for those designers that are working on print design projects, there are guidelines that need to be followed. In this video, I cover all the bases when it comes to sending files to a printer so that your projects can look as good as how you’ve designed them!
Why print production still matters in a digital world
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 takeoff.
Trim is your final 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 full bleed design works is that the image extends past the edge and the paper is cut down.
Safety is an imaginary margin on your page to keep any elements from being cut off. This mostly applies to text.
Gutter is the imaginary margin on the inside edge of your page for book and magazine spreads. Because of the binding, elements are pushed in to avoid falling into the gutter.
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 book and magazine spreads, 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 will 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 (the quality of your image).
Resolution is defined in DPI (dots per inch). The high-res requirement for print is 300DPI.
Use the Correct Program: Adobe InDesign
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 correctly for print. One of my designers didn’t listen to me about this. She did her entire layout in Illustrator. 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.
My 11-Step Pre-Flight Checklist
01 Check your trim size.
02 Check that you’ve set a bleed size in your document settings.
03 For elements on the edge, do they extend to the bleed size?
04 Do you have safety specs from your printer?
05 Are all of your text color(s) in CMYK?
06 Is the effective PPI for your images above 300?
07 Are your images in CMYK? (If not, go to Image > Mode > CMYK in Photoshop).
08 Export your project as a PDF X-1a with crops and bleed marks.
09 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 becomes second nature!
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? Leave me a comment below and keep on creating!
Don’t miss out on new videos and subscribe to my YouTube channel!