Print files that your printer will not send back
Bleed, CMYK and 300 DPI are not preferences. They are the difference between a job that prints and a job that waits.
Half the delays in a print job in this country are not the printer's fault. They are file problems that were baked in three days earlier.
Bleed
Add three millimetres on every edge and push any background colour or image out into it. Guillotines drift by a millimetre or two. Without bleed, that drift becomes a white sliver down the edge of every copy.
CMYK, not RGB
Your screen makes colour with light. A press makes it with ink. A neon blue that glows on a monitor can come back flat and dull on paper. Convert to CMYK before you approve anything, and look at it converted — not at the RGB version while telling yourself it will be fine.
300 DPI at final size
Not 300 DPI at the size you found the image. At the size it will actually print. A logo that is 800 pixels wide is fine on a business card and unusable on a roll-up banner.
Outline your type
Or embed the fonts. If the print shop does not have your typeface, an un-outlined file will silently substitute something else, and you will not find out until you are holding five hundred copies.
Get these four right and your job goes straight to press.
