How to get your documents ready for printing

So you have a spectacular design for your posters, fliers, postcards or business cards and want to send it for printing, what should you do? What formats are best? How do I know if the size is right?

Well, we’ll discuss about that today, although there is a wide variety of design programs, from Adobe’s top notch Photoshop and Illustrator to the most simple things like Windows Paint with QuarkXPress and others in the middle, formats remain the same for them all: JPEG, TIFF, PSD*. But the key element will always be one and just one: RESOLUTION.

Image resolution refers, in the most simple way, to the amount of “pixels” or little squares per inch that said image has, this is also measured in “dots per inch” or dpi. The higher the resolution, the more points or pixels the image has per every square inch. An image designed for poster printing must have a resolution of at least 300dpi otherwise it’ll look as it was made of little squares and without any smoothness.

When you prepare a file for printing make sure you leave a little on the edges, meaning, make it a little bigger, if, for example, you want your material to be printed on a 8.5” x 11” page, make your image 9” x 11.5” that way everything you need will be in the center and what is not needed may be lost during printing. This is a very common and useful tip that designers and publishers give to customers.

Then comes the format, not matter how big o how small a printing company is, they will be able to use any format you give to them for printing, though, for the sake of quality, it’s better to know what formats are best, for example, JPEG (or JPG) is a format commonly used on the web because of its compression rate, for printing it is not recommend precisely because of that, it is better if you bring a file on TIFF (if you have to e-mail it), PSD is best (if you have a broadband connection or if you will bring it personally on any media form) because it will keep the resolution intact and the smoothness will be perfect.

 

 

*This is Adobe Photoshop’s proprietary format.