How to supply artwork that prints the way you expect

If you are sending us a design rather than asking us to draw one, these are the things worth checking first. None of them is difficult; all of them are expensive to discover after printing.

Resolution, at the size it will be used

What matters is the effective resolution — the resolution after the image has been scaled to its final size.

• Cards, certificates, flyers — 300dpi at final size
• Signs read from a few metres — 150dpi at final size
• Large signs read from a road — 100dpi at final size is ample

A logo pulled off a website is typically a few hundred pixels wide. That is fine on a business card and unusable on a signpost. Enlarging it in an image editor adds pixels, not detail.

Vector for anything that gets resized

A crest that will appear on a badge, a card and a two-metre sign should be a vector file — it redraws cleanly at any size. If you only have a picture of it, we will redraw it as vector once and you can use that version everywhere afterwards.

Bleed and safe margins

Anything printed to the edge must extend past it, because trimming has a tolerance of about a millimetre. Extend backgrounds 3mm past the trim on small format. Equally, keep text and logos at least 5mm inside the edge so nothing gets clipped.

Colour

Supply artwork in CMYK where you can. If a specific colour matters — a school's exact blue, a corporate red — say so and give us a reference, because that is the only way to hold it across separate print runs.

Fonts

Outline the type or embed the fonts in a PDF. An unembedded font gets substituted somewhere along the way, and the first anyone notices is when the printed piece is set in the wrong typeface.

The short version

Send a PDF with fonts embedded, images at effective resolution and 3mm bleed. If all you have is a Word, Publisher or Canva file, send it anyway — we can work from it, we will just tell you first if it needs rebuilding for print.

Not sure whether your file will hold up at the size you want? Send it before you order. We will tell you the largest size it prints cleanly at, at no charge.