When a same-day job doesn’t make it out the same day, the reason is almost never the press. It’s the file. Something arrives at 72 dpi, or as a screenshot, or with the phone number cut off at the edge, and now there’s a conversation to have before anything can print.
Here’s how to avoid that, and what happens if you have nothing at all, which is a completely normal situation.
The short version
Send a PDF, sized at the finished dimensions, with images at roughly 300 dpi at that size. If you can do that, everything else on this page is optional reading.
Formats, ranked
PDF is the gold standard, because it carries fonts, vectors and images together and looks the same everywhere. AI and EPS are ideal when the artwork is genuinely vector: a logo, lettering, line work, because vectors scale to any size without losing quality. PSD works. PNG and JPG are fine if they’re large enough. Screenshots, images pulled from a website, and photos of a screen are the ones that cause problems, not because we’re fussy, but because the detail was never in the file to begin with.
Resolution, explained without jargon
A file has a fixed amount of detail in it. Printing bigger doesn’t add detail, it just spreads what’s there across more inches. A logo that looks crisp at one inch wide on a website has enough detail for one inch. Blown up to three feet on a banner, that same file is going to look soft, and no amount of processing invents the missing information.
The rule of thumb: aim for about 300 dpi at the size it will actually print. There is one useful exception. Large banners and vehicle graphics are viewed from further away, so they can get away with less. If you’re unsure, send what you have and we’ll tell you honestly whether it’ll hold up. Finding out before we print is free.
Bleed and safe margins
If your design has a background color or image that runs to the edge, it needs to extend past the trim line. That extra is called bleed. Cutters are accurate but not perfect, and without bleed you can end up with a thin white sliver along one edge.
The flip side is the safe margin: keep important text away from the edge, because that’s the part that gets trimmed off. If your phone number sits four millimeters from the edge of a business card, it’s living dangerously.
If your file has neither, don’t redo it. Send it, and we’ll extend the background and flag anything crowded too close to the edge on your proof.
Color: why it looks different printed
Screens make color with light. Presses make it with ink. A handful of screen colors (the electric blues, the fluorescent greens) simply have no ink equivalent, and they’ll come out slightly duller than they looked on your monitor. That isn’t a printing error; it’s physics.
Two practical notes. First, if a specific brand color matters, say so up front and bring a printed sample to match against, not a screenshot, since your screen and ours don’t agree either. Second, deep blacks in large areas print better as a rich black than as plain 100% K; if that means nothing to you, ignore it, because we’ll handle it.
Fonts
If you’re sending a layout file rather than a PDF, either outline your text or include the font files. Otherwise the font substitutes on our end, and your carefully chosen typeface becomes something else entirely. PDFs embed fonts automatically, which is one more reason PDF is the easy answer.
“I don’t have artwork at all”
Then you’re in the majority, and this is not a problem. Bring any of the following and we’ll work from it:
- The words you want on it, written down
- A logo. Any version, even a bad one, and we’ll tell you if it needs rebuilding
- A photo of the old sign, the old card, the old form
- A competitor’s piece you like the layout of
- A sketch on paper
Our design desk builds print-ready art from all of the above, every week. You approve a free proof before anything runs, so nothing prints that you haven’t seen.
Read the proof like you mean it
The proof is the last free moment. Check the phone number digit by digit. Check the spelling of every name. Check the dates, the address, and the web address. Read it out loud if it matters.
Our reprint guarantee covers us getting your approved proof wrong. That’s a free reprint, no argument. What it can’t cover is a typo that you approved and we faithfully printed. Two minutes with the proof is the cheapest insurance in the building.
Ready? Send your file with the quote form and we’ll come back with the posted price and a proof.