Nearly every artwork problem that reaches a press is one of eight things. Working through this list before you export takes about ten minutes and removes most of the risk from the job.
1. Built at the right trim size
Your document should be the finished size of the piece — 90 × 55mm for a standard business card, 148 × 210mm for an A5 flyer, and so on. Not the paper it is printed on. Check against the trim size on the product page before you start, not after.
2. 3mm bleed on every edge
Any artwork meant to reach the edge must extend 3mm past the trim on all four sides. Sheets are trimmed in stacks and a small amount of movement is normal; bleed is what guarantees no white sliver appears. A background that stops exactly at the trim line will show one.
3. Text 4mm inside the trim
The same movement works inward. Keep text, logos and anything you cannot afford to lose at least 4mm inside the trim edge. Be especially careful near corners, where two edges are in play at once.
4. CMYK, not RGB
Convert before you export so you see the colour shift on your own screen rather than on the proof. Keep body text at 100% K. See RGB vs CMYK.
5. Images at 300dpi effective at final size
Not 300dpi in the original file — 300dpi after your layout has scaled it. Logos should be vector, not raster. See image resolution for print.
6. Fonts embedded or outlined
A font that is not embedded gets substituted, and the substitute has different metrics, so your layout reflows. Embedding is a PDF export setting; outlining converts type to shapes and is irreversible, so keep an editable copy first.
7. Single pages in reading order
For anything multi-page, supply sequential single pages — page 1, 2, 3 — in one PDF, not printer spreads. Imposition is our job, and doing it yourself is the most reliable way to get pages in the wrong order.
8. Print-ready PDF, under 100MB
We accept print-ready PDFs up to 100MB. Other formats go to manual review, which can delay the job. If your PDF is oversized, it is usually because images were placed at far higher resolution than needed — downsampling to 300dpi at final size fixes it without any visible loss.
Then let the file check do its job
Every upload is inspected for trim, bleed, fonts, resolution and colour, and produces an on-screen proof with trim and bleed marks drawn on it. You approve that proof before you pay.
Read the warnings rather than clicking past them. They are advice, not a block — you can acknowledge one and we will print it — but they are also the last point at which a problem is free to fix. Start from a template and most of this list is handled before you begin.