Artwork Guide

Printvision’s artwork guide outlines issues you’ll need to consider when supplying artwork to ensure great quality prints with no delays. Artwork can be proofed by our amazing designers before print if requested when ordering, this allows you to see a visual on your artwork and how it will be printed.

Proofing terms and conditions do apply.

Templates

We have a wide range of artwork templates on our website, they can be found under the products once selected the size you require.

All our core collection catalogue products have templates for multiple sizes.

If a product doesn’t have artwork templates available, please email sales@printvision.co.uk and one of our team will be able to help you to supply your artwork.

File formats

Regardless of what software is used to create your artwork, your final artwork file should be exported to a print-ready file format at an appropriate size, in the correct colour mode and featuring sufficient bleed area around the edge.

The maximum file size that can be emailed to us is 35MB. This should be more than enough capacity to accommodate artwork at the required resolution for most of our products, provided an appropriate file format is used. For files larger than this, we recommend using an external file transfer site such as WeTransfer.

If for any reason you find you’re unable to upload your file, you can call our Design Team on 0116 266 6227 who’ll be able to diagnose the issue or organise an alternative way for you to supply your file.

It’s also important that your file is not too small. An image that appears fine on screen will lose quality when printed full size.

Files types we accept

PDFs

We request all our artwork to be supplied as high resolution (300dpi or higher for small format print, 100dpi or higher for large format print). It is important that you prepare your PDF file in the correct way. These options must be set for commercial printing:

• Preset - Choose Press Quality
• Compression Settings - For colour and greyscale this should be downsampled to 300dpi with "auto compression" set on high (please turn this off if your artwork is not at 100% of the required scale
• Font Embedding - Should be set to "embed all fonts"

Colour needs to be set as CMYK not RGB (RGB artwork will be auto converted to CMYK, and this will affect your colours.)

Illustrator

Embed all images and convert all text to outlines. Save as a Press Quality PDF file.

 

Photoshop

Set Resolution to 300dpi when starting your new document. Save as a Press Quality PDF file.

 

InDesign

Like the PDF requirements above, we require InDesign files to be saved as Press Quality PDFs using the same settings.

Microsoft Documents

Unfortunately, we’re unable to use the following formats for printing:

• Word
• Excel
• Powerpoint
• Publisher
• Works

As these applications aren’t designed to prepare print-ready artwork, we recommend you avoid them in favour of dedicated design software.

Colour

Any artwork that’s intended for print should be created in (or converted to) CMYK – not RGB. That’s because CMYK files achieve colours by mixing Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black in the same way that printers mix inks to achieve colours on the page.

 

Artwork Bleed /Crop & Print marks

All our templates contain the bleed for the artwork, please do not add on extra bleed onto the templates as this is not necessary. For custom products we will advise you on how much bleed to keep.

Adding crop or print marks to your artwork is NOT necessary. If the artwork is supplied at the correct dimensions using our templates, we’ll be able to set it up for print and finishing as per our requirements

Multi-page products

Where your print product runs over several pages, we recommend submitting a single PDF file in the order you'd like it to print, with the front cover on page 1 and the back cover on the last page.

If you choose to upload separate files, they should be numbered with a prefix to show the order you want them to print, for example:

01_YourFileName,

02_YourFileName,

03_YourFileName

etc.

When supplying artwork for multi-page documents such as stapled brochures, there’s no need to work out which pages will sit opposite each other.

In fact, we ask that you do not supply your pages as “Printers’ Pairs.” We prefer to receive your pages in order in the method outlined above.

If you can't supply your artwork in this way, you can still place your order with your artwork and one of our designers will check your files for you. Be aware that adding this step additional charges may apply depending on the products and detail of artwork you would like. Lead times are from approval of artworks.

Need Further Help?

Our online customer support chat is available 8:30-5:30 Monday-Friday or call our team on 0116 266 6227 who will be more than willing to help.