Contrary to what the digital world tries to say, print is not dead. It’s very much alive and even making a strong resurgence with some of the more artistic forms of printing such as letterpress and screen printing. Depending on the size of a company, a pre-press production assistant can be its own job title or the responsibilities of setting up clean print files can fall on the designer. Unfortunately, a lot of schools, both elite and technical don’t teach the basic fundamentals of creating a clean production file for the printer. You learn software, you learn principles of design, but when you send your files to press, they’re atrocious and end up costing the company money when the printer has to fix your mistakes.
Thanks to on the job training, I learned a ton about pre-press production. I think it’s a valuable skill to have whether you’re in an in-house designer like yours truly or are working at a trendy agency. You should still know the difference between a spot and a process color, how to make your images press ready and that a bleed doesn’t mean you have a cut on your finger.
Swatch palette in InDesign set up for all 4-color process printing. There are no spot colors, no lab colors and no rogue RGB colors. This is a clean palette for press.
This swatch palette shows a mixture of swatches and is not a clean palette for press. It shows spots, 4-color process, RGB and lab colors. RGB and lab should not go to press. Spot is okay if you are intending to pay for spot ink.
1. Out, Out Damn Spot
We designers love our Pantone chips. They are the color system for picking inks in printing and design. However, lots of companies don’t have the money to print the actual spot ink colors of chips and go the more economical 4-color process route. When you bring your Pantone swatches into a color palette, such as the one shown here in InDesign, they are brought in as spot colors. If your company or client is paying for spot, great, but if not, don’t set your file up this way. You need to convert your spot colors to CMYK process. This can change the appearance of the color. To ensure it looks the way you want, look at the CMYK formula Pantone guide.
2. CMYK versus RGB versus LAB
Printing uses CMYK printing, which is making all the colors in your piece out of a combination of the 4 main inks on a press: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. This is the correct format for printing. RGB is used in web and video and stands for red, green and blue. Colors are much simpler, less rich and look dramatically different than they do on press. LAB is a rich color format that shows all the human eye is capable of seeing. However, currently, most presses cannot accommodate LAB and it is not suggested you use it for press projects.
3. Keep Your Content in the Live Area
This is an InDesign file of a brochure I made. The outer red line shows the bleed, which is 1/8″. This will be trimmed off to the black line, which is the trim area. You don’t put content with words in the trim area as there’s a chance it’ll get cut off. You put in margins to make your live area content safe. The live area is contained within the magenta lines.
When receiving printing specs from a vendor, often you’re given them as a “flat size or bleed size, trim area and live area.” Flat size or bleed size accommodates for a 1/8″ – 1/4″ extension beyond the finished page size. You pull all your artwork that doesn’t contain text out to the bleeds. When the paper is trimmed, there will be no white margin area, it’ll be a clean print all the way to the edge. The trim size is the finished size of the document, so an 8.5″-w x 11″-h flyer is the finished size, but the bleed size would be 8.75″-w x 11.25″-h to accommodate for the extra 1/8″ bleed all the way around. The live area is the area where your essential content should go, especially text. It’s safe here in that it won’t get cut off and it won’t hug the edge of the paper. Standard margins are anywhere from 1/4″- 3/8″, though can go higher. Always check with your print vendor to see what they prefer.
4. Can You Use This Picture From Google?
Clients are notorious for not understanding the difference in high versus web resolution imagery. They also aren’t well-versed in copyright laws. Images from the internet cannot be used in print. Print images need to be a minimum resolution of 240 dpi, though 300 dpi is the preferred standard. Images from the web are only 72 dpi and will not go through the pre-press software at a print shop. They turn out pixelated and distorted as well. Furthermore, images on the internet are not free game, they are copyrighted. It is best to use original imagery taken by a professional photographer or purchase stock imagery from legitimate stock sites such as iStockPhoto, BigStockPhoto and Getty. Always purchase the high resolution file that is 300dpi.
5. Are You Staring at My TIFFs?
There are so many file extensions around for images, it’s hard to know which is correct. However, they are not all created equal and print guidelines for imagery are strict. PNG, GIF and BMP files are not made for print. They are low resolution, low color files for web use. PNG files are preferred, because you can preserve a transparent background and not get a white box around it like you do a JPG. However, PNGs are condensed to make a smaller file size and therefore lose data and quality. If you need a transparent background, use a PSD Photoshop file. TIFF is the ideal image format for photos and other raster art that doesn’t require transparency. It preserves the most data in the file and provides the highest quality image. A TIFF should be saved at CMYK for press or Grayscale for black and white. A JPG will work in a high resolution format, but again, data is lost in a JPG so it’s not the best.
If you’re using vector art such as a logo or icon, then an Adobe Illustrator file (.ai) or Adobe Illustrator EPS (.eps) are the correct format, saved in CMYK color mode. Don’t put your logo in a raster format like JPG or TIFF, it will lose sharpness when you increase the size.
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