Artwork Guidelines

To help you your create print ready artwork, we have created a collection of short tutorials to explain the essential requirements. It is vital that your artwork meets these requirements or your order may be delayed whilst we ask you to make corrections.

Essential Requirements

Additional Tutorials

Our expert team have prepared some additional tutorials to help our customers make the most of their designs and learn new skills. These are available below:

Creating artwork for Spot-UV (AKA Spot-Gloss) products

Spot UV Artwork - When setting up spot gloss artwork you should supply two files of identical dimensions, one file for the print, and one for the spot gloss layer. Everything on the spot gloss layer should be in 100% black and should be placed relative to where it should appear on the print file. All files should include a minimum 2mm bleed and preferably include crop marks. Please bear in mind that lines below 0.25mm cannot be guaranteed to come out in spot UV application, and that there is a 1mm registration tolerance that should be taken into account when creating your artwork.

Spot gloss example (pages 1 and 3 are artwork, 2 and 4 are spot gloss)

Creating artwork with pantones (specialist colours)

Creating Artwork with Pantones - in Illustrator Create your design as normal in Illustrator. On the colour swatches palette, click on the small arrow in the top right hand corner and select Open Swatch Library > Colour Books > and then choose the appropriate swatch library. Select the element of the design you want to print from the pantone, and then click the swatch you require. The highlighted part of the design will convert to the pantone colour.

Making the most of black

Making the Most of Black - When using black in a CMYK document, it is important to ensure that you consider the result you wish to achieve. If you use only the black channel with 100% coverage, the result will be more of a dark greyish or charcoal black. To get a rich, deep black, we recommend using a CMYK make up of 30/30/30/100 (that is 30% cyan, 30% magenta, 30% yellow and 100% black).

Creating PDFs from any programme using free software

Converting any file to a PDF - PDFs give you a more accurate impression of how your file will look when printed. If you are preparing your artwork in a format that we do not accept (such as Microsoft Office), you will need to convert it to a PDF.

A quick way of doing this is to use the free online conversion service at Neevia (click the image below to use this service).

This will allow you to upload your original artwork and then download a PDF. Select Acrobat 7 at a resolution of 300 and always check the PDF to ensure it appears as expected.

If you would like to do this frequently, there is an excellent free program for Windows called doPDF, which installs itself as a printer on your computer. This means that you can create a PDF from any programme with a 'Print' option just by selecting doPDF from the list of printers.

Simply download and install doPDF, go to the programme you designed your artwork with, select Print and in the list of printers select 'doPDF'. The default settings are acceptable so you do not need to specify anything else. Once you continue and print the file, you will be asked where to save the PDF.

Templates

Below are some templates you can use to help design your artwork.

Folding Leaflet Templates:

Single Fold Leaflet Templates The templates show you how to set up artwork for folding leaflets.

• A5 (folded to A6)
• A4 (folded to A5)
• A4 (folded to A5 Long)
• A3 (folded to A4)
• A3 (folded to A4 Long)

Double-fold Leaflets TemplatesThe templates show you how to set up artwork for folding leaflets.

• A5 Folded to 1/3 A5 - ROLL FOLD
• A5 Folded to 1/3 A5 - CONCERTINA FOLD
• A4 Folded to 1/3 A4 - ROLL FOLD
• A4 Folded to 1/3 A4 - CONCERTINA FOLD
• A3 folded to 1/3 A3 - ROLL FOLD
• A3 folded to 1/3 A3 - CONCERTINA FOLD
• 6 Page A5 Leaflet - ROLL FOLD
• 6 Page A5 Leaflet - CONCERTINA FOLD
• 6 Page A4 Leaflet - ROLL FOLD
• 6 Page A4 Leaflet - CONCERTINA FOLD

Cross-fold Leaflets TemplatesThe templates show you how to set up artwork for folding leaflets.

• A4 folded to A6
• A3 folded to A5
• A3 folded to A6
• A2 folded to A5

Folders:

• A5 Oversized Interlocking Flaps Die
• A4 Oversized Capacity
• A4 Oversized Curved flap BC slot
• A4 Oversized Interlocking Flaps Die

Tickets:

• Two-part Ticket
• Three-part Ticket
• Ticket with Hologram