Print Ready Artwork | Fewer Delays Before Press

January and February are when the artwork queue gets ugly. Park operators sign off wayfinding and tariff boards for an Easter opening, PBSA teams prep hoarding for a summer handover, and anyone with a spring show is booking stand graphics, all in the same fortnight. The jobs that go straight to press are the ones where the folder was right first time. The rest lose two or three days to email: a query goes to you, you go to the designer, the designer's on another deadline, and the corrected file comes back with a fresh problem.

So here's what we want in the folder, and what happens when it isn't there.

A print-ready PDF, and the right flavour of it

Export from InDesign, Illustrator or Affinity, one page per printed item, in the order you want them. Then choose your preset deliberately, because PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-4 behave differently and the difference shows up on press. X-1a flattens all transparency at export and forces everything to CMYK. If your file has drop shadows, feathered edges, multiply blends or a Pantone sitting over a transparent object, flattening can leave a visible seam or box where the flattener carved the artwork up, and overprint settings can end up baked in the wrong way round. X-4 keeps transparency live and hands the decision to our RIP, which is what you want for large format and for anything with soft effects. For plain CMYK litho with no transparency in the file, X-1a is the safer, dumber option and there's nothing wrong with it. If you're not sure which the file needs, send it and we'll look at the separations in overprint preview.

Send an .indd or .ai instead and we need every linked image and every font, and one missing link means we're guessing. Canva downloads need checking before they leave your machine, because the standard export is often RGB with no bleed. PowerPoint means a rebuild.

Fonts: embed or outline

There is no third option.

Embedded keeps text editable if you spot a typo at proof stage. Outlined is safest for logos and for anything heading to a cutter, where a substituted font changes the cut path itself.

When a font isn't embedded, our system substitutes something close and doesn't tell you loudly. You'd never spot it on a thumbnail. What you get is a headline that reflows, a line breaking after "per" instead of after "night", and a tariff board that reads oddly to a guest standing in front of it. We catch most of them on the proof. Relying on that is a bad plan when there are forty signs in the order.

Colour is the other quiet one. RGB images convert, and mostly they convert well, but saturated brand blues and bright oranges flatten off in CMYK and look nothing like the screen. Tell us which colours are doing the brand work before a run of 4,000 leaflets, and we'll look at them properly first.

Effective resolution, not file resolution

The rule is simple arithmetic: original dpi divided by the scale factor in your layout. Place a 300dpi photo and enlarge it to 400% and you have a 75dpi photo. Check the effective ppi in the links panel and ignore how big the original JPEG feels.

Everything in this table is at final printed size, after any scaling. Supplying 100dpi at a tenth scale is 10dpi on the wall.

Bleed, and the fact that 3mm is only for paper

Three millimetres of artwork past the trim on every edge, crop marks offset so they sit outside the bleed. Keep live text and logos 4 to 5mm inside the trim, because trimming tolerance cuts both ways. Without bleed, the guillotine leaves a hairline of white on one edge where the stack shifted half a millimetre, and on 500 folded leaflets that becomes a reprint conversation.

Large format runs to different numbers, and this is where files get built wrong:

• PVC banners: allow roughly 50mm of extra material on each edge for the welded hem, with eyelets at about 500mm centres. Nothing you need to read should sit in that zone.
• Routed-and-folded Dibond trays: the image has to carry round the return, typically 25mm on each edge, so a 25mm border of background gets folded out of sight.
• Stretched canvas: 40mm or more wraps round the bars, separately from anything above.
• Roller banner cassettes: bleed at the top and bottom is machine-specific, and part of the graphic disappears into the base.

Ask what the allowance is before you build the file. Retrofitting 50mm of sky onto a photograph that was cropped tight is a redraw.

Spot colours named properly

If your brand runs a Pantone, the swatch needs to be a spot swatch called what it actually is: PANTONE 2965 C. Not "Blue", not "Brand Colour 1", not "Pantone 2965" spelled three different ways across five files.

Multi-item orders are where it shows. A park sends a tariff board, a set of directional signs and a welcome pack, built by three different people over four years, and there are four versions of the same green in the folder. On signage installed within sight of each other, the client sees all four from the car park on day one.

The other half of it is housekeeping: unused spot swatches left in the document, or a spot applied to a white shape nobody deleted. On a litho job that can turn a four-colour press run into a five-colour one without anyone intending it.

Finished size, quantity and purpose, in writing

Put it in the email, not just the filename. "A5 leaflet" tells us less than "148x210mm portrait, 1,000 off, 170gsm silk, both sides, for a caravan park welcome pack that also has to fit a DL wallet." That answers three questions we'd otherwise have to ask, and if the file we open measures 154x216mm because someone built it at bleed size, the stated finished size is what tells us which measurement is real.

Quantity changes the process, and the process changes the file. Digital toner and inkjet simulate Pantones in CMYK, so a critical brand colour needs signing off on a proof rather than trusted to the swatch name. Litho turns that same Pantone into an actual fifth plate, which means overprint and knockout settings matter and total ink coverage on a rich black needs watching. Litho also has to impose onto a sheet, so an awkward finished size wastes a chunk of every sheet, and there's usually a nearby size that doesn't.

The bit nobody wants to admit

Half the time you have none of the above. You have a Word document the last marketing manager wrote, a logo dragged off the website at 400 pixels wide, and a deadline. That's a normal Tuesday, and it's fixable. Saying so up front beats sending the Word file labelled "final artwork" and hoping.

• Word and PowerPoint content becomes copy. We'll rebuild the layout in InDesign and send a PDF proof. Send the file for the words, not the design.
• A low-res website logo can often be redrawn as vector. A plain wordmark is quick. A gradient, a photographic element or fine linework is a bigger job, so flag it now rather than the day before the banner goes up.
• Whoever built the brand has the EPS, AI or SVG somewhere. A designer, a previous agency, the old server. Ten minutes of asking saves a redraw.
• Phone JPEGs work on a hoarding and fall apart on a brochure cover. We'll tell you which side of that line you're on before quoting.

One last thing on timing. Print is the middle of the chain, not the end: signage needs installing, stand graphics need to reach a venue by a delivery window set by the organiser, and a welcome pack needs to be in the reception cupboard before the first guests arrive. A file query in early January costs nothing. The same query in the last fortnight before an Easter opening costs you the opening.

Send the folder over and we'll open everything and tell you what's missing before anything goes near a press. If you'd rather start with one file, send the trickiest one.