DESIGN SERVICES

The success of your business 
begins with your image.

First impressions count and it is important to ensure that your business marketing is created professionally. Why choose us? Because we believe our extensive experience in the printing industry and professional design skills make us a good choice for your business.

Our aim is to make things easy for you. If you are not familiar with commercial print, designing and setting up your files to press ready standards can be a daunting task and very confusing. You can contact us with any enquiries you may have, take advantage of our free Artwork Checking or let us design or amend your artwork. 

We offer a professional and affordable design service starting from only £15. Whether you need promotional print, editorial design, a logo or advertising, we will be able to help. 

Contact us

ARTWORK GUIDELINES

BLEED

If your design includes colour or images which are printed up to the edge of the page, you will need to add bleed to avoid the risk of white edges showing on the final print due to inaccuracies in the guillotining process. To add the bleed, extend your background and images 3mm on each side of your artwork.

COLOUR

Any artwork received using Pantone, Spot or RGB will be converted into CMYK format.  Please note that when converting RGB to CMYK some of the colours will change and become much duller. CMYK has a smaller gamut than RGB, which means you can not reproduce with inks all the colours you can create with RGB on your computer screen. Not all RGB colours can be reproduced exactly in CMYK, bright vivid reds, greens and blues will translate into duller CMYK colours. 

COPY

Have you checked all the spelling, grammar and punctuation in your copy? Are you sure your prices and contact details are correct? 

CROP MARKS

We advise to offset the crop marks by 3mm so they are not visible on the final print.

FONTS

All fonts used in your artwork need to be embedded or saved as outlines to avoid the risk of your final print showing an alternative typeface.

INK COVERAGE

Print with high ink coverage takes longer to dry and may result in set-off (the ink of a still wet sheet rubs off on whatever is stacked on top of it). We recommend an ink coverage limit of 225%. Work out the total percentage by adding the CMYK values together and try not to exceed 300% ink coverage in any of your chosen colours in your design file.

MARGINS

Your margins can be the same as the safe area for most products including staple-bound booklets, but for perfect bound books a minimum of 12mm is required.

PHOTOGRAPHS

Save as .EPS or .TIF files to preserve the colour and clarity. They should be 300dpi at the size intended to be printed.

PDF

PDF (Portable Document Format) is the industry standard for saving files with all the specifications necessary to produce high-resolution printed output. Please save your artwork as a press-ready CMYK PDF/X1a:2001, with all fonts embedded, crop marks and 3mm bleed.

RESOLUTION

Resolution refers to the sharpness and quality of images in your artwork. The standard resolution for print is 300dpi (dots per inch); lower resolution could look pixelated when printed and anything higher will not improve the image print quality. 

RICH BLACK

If you are using big areas of black in your artwork we recommend setting your black as rich black C 60%, Y 0%, M 0%, K 100%, on screen this colour will look slightly blue but in print will appear black. Use rich black for objects that are at least 5mm thick.

SAFE AREA

Keep all text, along with vital images, at least 5mm from the edge of the document.

SINGLE COLOUR BLACK

Single colour black C 0%, M 0%, Y 0%, K 100% is used for text and barcodes. Try to use single colour black whenever possible to avoid difficult registration issues when printing. 

TRANSPARENCIES

If you use transparencies in your design bear in mind that to print correctly, all transparent objects will need to be flattened. The flattening process will convert all the overlapping elements into a format that captures the look of the original transparency.

TINTS

Lighter shades that contain less than 5% colour will print much lighter than they appear on screen, for best results use tints containing between 5% and 30%.

Eva Design & Print trading as April Print