Whether it’s for newsletters, stationery or Christmas cards, a professional printing bureau is often your best option. Ben Pitt explains what’s involved
Home printers are great when you want to make a few quick copies of something, but when print runs involve hundreds of copies it all becomes much more laborious. The paper input and output trays need constant monitoring. The printer randomly reports that an ink cartridge is empty, even though you know there’s still enough for dozens more pages, so you stand over the printer watching for streaky colours. When it’s time to replace a cartridge, you discover the colour you need is the only one that’s not there. Then there’s the rigmarole of collating and folding multiple-page documents without getting the pages mixed up.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Upload your design to a commercial printing service, select how many copies, the paper quality and finish you want and – typically within 48 hours – you’ll have the prints delivered to your door.
The cost of getting it done professionally is also often less than printing at home. Domestic printer ink is one of the most expensive substances known to man, at around £1 per millilitre. Per-page print costs range from 3p to 10p for a full-colour A4 page. These figures are based on tests using business graphics documents with a mixture of text and diagrams. If your document has lots of images or a coloured background, ink costs are likely to be much higher. Double the cost for two-sided printing, add a further 1p per page for paper – or more if you want better-quality paper – and you’re looking at anything from 10p to 25p per A4 print.
Printing bureaux work out cheaper for larger print runs. For a double-sided A4 print on economy paper you might pay around £25 for 250 copies – roughly the same as doing it at home. However, 1,000 copies might be £50 (5p each), while 10,000 might be £250 (2.5p each). It also helps that certain types of print jobs aren’t subject to VAT.
Even for relatively small print runs where there isn’t a significant cost saving, it’s likely you’ll achieve a better result with a bureau. Professional printers can print right up to the edges of the page – something that domestic inkjets can do for photo paper but not usually for other types, and certainly not at high speed. You can choose sizes from A7 to A0, square leaflets and flyers, business cards, greeting cards, compliment slips and all sorts of other shapes and sizes. There’s usually a wide range of paper grades available, and additional services such as folding, stapling and laminating are all part of the service. Some companies offer customisable design templates, while others offer a bespoke design service paid by the hour, so you can get something polished and professional for very little effort.
SHOPPING AROUND
There are lots of printing bureaux available, and it’s worth doing some research to find the right product at the right price. A Google search for ‘printing services’, ‘leaflet printing’ or some other choice words will throw up dozens of matches and you can begin to compare prices. Watch out for folded paper sizes – some companies quote prices for the folded size, while others quote for the opened-out size.
It can be tricky to navigate all the options, particularly when it comes to paper types and finishes. Some printers charge a significant premium for matt or gloss finishes compared to uncoated, while others charge the same regardless. That’s because some finishes are dependent on the paper type, while others use a lamination process after printing. You can also choose from recycled paper and specialist finishes such as iridescent.
The best way to navigate these options with confidence is to request a sample pack. These include a range of paper types, weights and finishes offered by that particular printer, so you can compare them directly.
Turnaround times vary. Urban Design & Print (www.urbanprinting.co.uk) offers next-day delivery if you place the order by 4.30pm. Instantprint (www.instantprint.co.uk) has a two-working-day turnaround for orders placed by 5pm. Saxoprint’s (www.saxoprint.co.uk) standard delivery is five working days, although there are options for faster turnarounds. These variations are generally reflected in the price charged, so if you’re not in any rush this is an easy way to
reduce your printing costs.
Also consider customer service. Most commercial printers allow artwork to be uploaded and the print job to be defined using an online form, but it’s often helpful to be able to discuss your requirements with a human being. We’d recommend giving the company a call to discuss the details of your job. If you can’t get through or don’t get a helpful response, it doesn’t bode well for if you run into problems later on.
PREPARING YOUR ARTWORK
One advantage of printing at home is that you can run off one copy and see how it looks. If you’re paying for 1,000 copies up front you want to be sure that your print job is going to come out right.
You don’t have to leave it all to chance, though. Many printers can send you an electronic proof, which is typically a PDF that they will use to print. This can help to identify any glaring problems such as colours that haven’t converted properly or text that’s cropped off the bottom of the page. However, these are less useful if you want to check colours. Colours can look very different on a monitor compared to print, and vary from printer to printer too. You won’t learn much about colours by checking a proof on the same monitor on which you designed the artwork. For added assurance you can usually order a printed proof to be posted, although this will inevitably increase the cost and lead time for the job.
We spoke to Phil Foster, key account manager at Saxoprint, about the proofing process. He explained that all submissions get a standard artwork check, which will usually pick up glaring errors such as very low-resolution images. For an additional £14, clients can request a Superior Check, which will flag up any issues regarding embedded fonts, RGB colour conversion and so on – more on these points below.
SIZING UP
It’s crucial that the design is the right size for the format you’ve chosen. If it isn’t, the printer may simply adjust it to fit and part of the design may be cropped off. Many printers provide template documents in popular formats such as InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator that you can download and use for the basis of your design. Saxoprint goes a step further and offers an InDesign plug-in so that templates can be accessed directly from inside the software.
If there isn’t a suitable template available, it’s not hard to make one yourself. First of all, check the measurements of the printed document, which should be shown on the website you’re planning to order from. If the specification of a folded document isn’t clear, phone or email for clarification.
Next, you need to think about bleed. This is a margin (usually 3mm) around the edge of the printed area. Bleed is important because of the way in which commercial printers create documents with colour right up to the edge of the page. The printer can’t actually do this, so instead, designs are printed on to oversized paper – usually much larger with multiple copies side by side – and the paper is cut to size after printing. This printed area isn’t always perfectly aligned with the cut area, so a 3mm bleed area provides a margin of error. Any background colours and images need to extend all the way to the edge of the bleed area; there’s no point in creating a bleed if you don’t use it.
For the same reason that you need a 3mm bleed extending beyond the edge of the paper size, you should also allow for a 3mm safety area on the inside edge of the paper dimensions. This safety area shouldn’t include text or anything else that would look wrong if it were cropped by a slightly misaligned cut. In practice the tolerance for printing and cutting is usually much better than 3mm, and many printers only require a 2mm bleed, but even so it’s good practice to allow 3mm either side of the page edge.
Most ready-made templates include marked-out bleed and safety areas, but they’re easy to create from scratch, too. Desktop publishing software such as Adobe InDesign and Xara Photo & Graphic Designer understand what a bleed is, so it’s a simple matter of switching the option on and setting the bleed width when defining the page size.
If you’re starting a document from scratch in a bitmap editor such as Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, establish the required page size and then add 6mm to these dimensions to create the 3mm bleed around the document. You’ll also need to set the resolution in dots per inch (dpi). 300dpi is standard for printing, but it might be worth editing at a higher resolution such as 600dpi. Most bitmap editors are destructive, in that the image information is altered each time you make an edit. Repeatedly resizing an image adds small quantisation errors each time, and this can eventually take its toll on details. Editing at 600dpi and resizing down to 300dpi at the end should mean that these errors aren’t noticeable.
Illustration and desktop-publishing software doesn’t have this problem, as resizing objects doesn’t affect the raw data in the same way. These applications don’t require you to set the resolution when you create a new file, either – it’s only necessary when you come to export. When the time comes, choose 300dpi.
It’s all well and good having a bleed area, but you still want to know where the edge of the page and the safety area are. Xara shows the bleed as a red line that’s independent of the page size, but in Photoshop Elements you just have a blank canvas.
The easiest way to define the edge of the page and the safety area is with guides. These are lines that can be switched on and off and won’t appear in print. To create a guide in most design applications, simply drag from the Ruler along the top and left edges of the canvas on to the document. You may need to make Rulers visible first; you can find this option in Xara’s Window menu or in Photoshop Elements’ View menu. Right-clicking the Ruler reveals options to calibrate it in millimetres, so you can zoom in and position the guides accurately.
When creating a template for folded and multiple-page documents, it’s best to check with the printing company how best to submit the artwork. For a single folded page you’ll probably want to create the design as it appears folded out, in which case you can simply add a guide to identify the fold. Make sure the front and back of the design are labelled in a way the printer recognises to avoid the paper being folded the wrong way. For designs that involve multiple sheets of paper, again, check with the printer. Saxoprint requests that pages are numbered as individual files.
IMAGES AND EXPORT
Regardless of whether you’re working in desktop-publishing or image-editing software, you’ll need to keep an eye on the resolutions of imported images. As we mentioned above, 300dpi is the standard resolution for print. Some people are happy to drop to 250dpi or even 200dpi, especially for posters that will be viewed from a few feet away, but as a rule we’d stick to 300dpi.
That’s easy to achieve with today’s high-resolution cameras. An A4 page is 297x210mm, or 11.7 by 8.3 inches, so you’d need a 3,510x2,490-pixel image to cover the page at 300dpi. That’s only 8.7 megapixels. However, while the average SLR or CSC photo will look great printed at A4 size, a 12-megapixel smartphone snap might not be so impressive if details are obscured by noise-reduction processing.
It’s rare for printed documents to use full-page photos, though, so you’re on safe ground with smaller images that appear on a section of the page. Steer clear of images taken from websites, though – not just for copyright reasons, but also because they tend to be small and heavily compressed. We talked to Jeff Chaplin from Urban Design & Print, who told us that the most common problem for submitted designs are images that are too low resolution.
If you’re in need of high-resolution images, check out our article on using other people’s images legally in Multimedia Expert, Shopper 325. While you’re locating back issues, also pick out issue 331, where we gave a crash course in the finer points of desktop publishing.
Another thing to think about is colours. Cameras record images and monitors display them using red, green and blue (RGB) colour channels. Printers, on the other hand, squirt cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK) ink. These two colour modes have a slightly different gamut – that is, there are certain tones that can be described by one but not the other – and there’s no standard way to convert from one to another.
If artwork arrives at a commercial printer in RGB format, the first thing they’ll do is convert it to CMYK. This can lead to skewed colours, and the exact nature of this skew will vary from printer to printer.
As such, it’s best to perform the CMYK conversion yourself. Unfortunately, this is something that’s generally only available in pricier versions of software – Photoshop CC but not Photoshop Elements, Xara Designer Pro but not Photo & Graphic Designer. It’s not a disaster if you submit in RGB format, but you’ll have less cause to complain if colours don’t come out as you expect.
To work in CMYK format, open photos in an image editor and locate the menu option to convert them to CMYK. In Photoshop CC you’ll find this under the Image menu, Mode. You can then perform any colour correction that’s required to this CMYK image before importing it into desktop-publishing software.
If you’re laying out your design in Photoshop, set the document’s colour mode to CMYK when you create it (or at any later time if necessary). Any RGB photos will be automatically converted to CMYK when you paste them in.
Most printers will accept artwork in Photoshop’s native PSD format, but it’s important to flatten the file to a single layer to avoid elements become corrupted or lost. In fact, the safest way to submit artwork is in JPEG format. There’s nothing complicated or clever about a JPEG – each pixel has a colour, and that’s it. Therefore there’s no risk of fonts going missing, layers being read incorrectly and so on. Set the compression quality to 100% to avoid compression artefacts, ensure that you’re saving in CMYK format (if your software supports it) and you’re good to go.
The only slightly nerve-wracking thing is that some software displays CMYK JPEGs incorrectly. If you viewed your ready-to-send CMYK JPEG in Picasa, for example, the colours would look very odd. Windows Photo Viewer handles these files correctly, though.
For desktop-publishing documents, the colour mode is defined when you come to export, so select CMYK on export if it’s available. PDF is often used to send artwork to printers, but beware that there are masses of variations to the PDF standard. PDF/X is the one to go for if your software supports it; virtually all professional desktop-publishing applications do, but consumer-level ones don’t. Regardless, we’d still recommend exporting in JPEG format, as once again it reduces the chances of mistakes. Jeff Chaplin from Urban Design & Print described how his company had a recurring problem with the Arts Council logo, which mysteriously disappeared from documents, even when it had been submitted by different clients. Flattening artwork to JPEGs removes any chance of this kind of problem.
If you’re not in the mood to learn a new DTP or image-editing application, Instantprint has an option to create designs directly in a web browser. Click the Design Products tab at the top of the page and select from compliment slips, flyers, folded leaflets, business cards and letterheads. You’ll then be offered a range of templates to kick-start your design, or you can create a design from scratch. The design can incorporate text, uploaded images and simple shapes such as rectangles, circles and stars. There’s a basic snap-to-grid function to keep things aligned, and the web application will alert you immediately if you enlarge an image too much. These design tools are pretty basic, but it’s a good way to get quick results and to ensure that your design fits the template.