Artwork

While designing a particular job one must keep some important elements in mind, such as the trim size or the finished size of the product, number of colours used in the artwork and post press fabrications, if any.

Things to note:

Layout:

• Extend all bleed elements such as photogprahs, tint colors, boxes, lines etc., around 3 mm outside the page area.
• All page elements other than bleed items such as page numbers, logos, design elements should be minimum of 4 mm inside the page area. Anything less than 4 mm may cause cut. Some elements in the centre pages edges can cut in the saddle stitch/center pinning job & folding of 24 pages or more because of creep problem. We do compensate for the creep according to the paper used for the job, but still suggest to keep all elements min 3-4 mm to give some leverage for the folding/binding department.
• Delete items not used in the layout. Just dragging them off the page will cause problems in processing your file.

Type/Fonts:

Make sure you include all fonts used in the document as well as in EPS graphics. PostScript fonts are preferable, but TrueType fonts are also accepted. Each PostScript font has two components – screen fonts and printer fonts – make sure you include both.

Avoid very small type sizes to avoid illegible text. Do not use type lesser than 6 points. Especially with reverse type, avoid using type smaller than 6 points. Sans-serif typefaces are best suited for reverse type. In case of serif fonts, the fine serif areas can disappear when printed reverse on a high ink coverage area. In such areas, use a larger or bold typeface or a sans-serif typeface.

Make sure that you have loaded entire family of fonts – Normal, Bold, Italic, Bold Italic etc. along with printer font. For ex. if you want to use Garamond-Bold font you should load Garamond-Bold font, Screen font (.PFM) and printer font (.PFB) into system.

Select type styles such as bold and italic from the font menu. Do not apply the bold or italic button to normal font. Selecting Bold, Italic button to the plain fonts will only simulate italic by skewing and bold by double-strike during output, if the Italic and Bold printer fonts were not loaded in the computer system.

Images:

All raster images should be saved as TIFF or EPS formats. All image files should be in CMYK mode and not RGB. Do not save the files in JPEG format, as JPEG compression removes lot of pixel data from file, which will result in heavy loss of detail. However, JPEG compression with “Maximum Quality” setting will not have any visible loss of details. You can use TIFF with LZW compression for totally loseless compression. The resolution for all raster images/photographs should be 300 dpi at 100% of reproduction size. The minimum acceptable resolution is 200 dpi. Do not resize or rotate images within the page layout program. Resize in an image manipulation program like Photoshop. Do not scale images in layout application more than 20%. Reducing / enlarging the images more than 25-30% may result in loss of detail. Do not drag/drop or copy/paste graphics from the graphics application to the page Layout Application. Always use the Place/Import command to get images into a page layout program.

Colours

The RGB color space is larger than the CMYK color space. So, not all colors defined in RGB can be perfectly reproduced in CMYK. That is the reason for stressing that all colors should be defined in CMYK – whether in image-manipulation, illustration, or page layout programs.

Do not apply “Registration” color in place of “Black” color other than in crop marks.

For tints/flat screens – use only a combination of 3 colors. In case of four color tints – see that atleast one of the color is 100%. Restrict tint colors to only two color percentages when assigning color to small Text.

Blends/Gradients:

As far as possible create gradients in an image manipulation software, i.e., Photoshop, CorelPaint etc., Creating large size gradients in Coreldraw, Illustrator, Freehand will result in heavy banding. Please convert all vignettes to bitmaps (Greyscale/CMYK) and apply some noise. Use the noise filter Photoshop or Corel Photopaint with a setting of around 3-5 pixels on all gradients, to reduce banding. Avoid blends or gradients or tints with four screens. Use a combination of only three colors, or have the fourth color as a 100% solid. This is because the smoothness of the blend or the evenness of a flat tint is compromised by having halftone tints in all four colors.

Rules/Lines:

Never use default hairline setting for lines. This can differ from program to program, and can also change with imagesetter resolution. Specify the thickness of all lines. The minimum thickness of the lines should be for solid (100% ink) line on a white Background – 0.5 points for tinted (screened) line – 0.7 points (Restrict the tint colors to two) for reversed line (white) – 0.8 points on a black or a colored background.

Post-Press Operations:

Jobs requiring Post-press operations such as spot UV, punching, foil stamping etc. should be accompanied by required graphic elements in 100% solid or the required keylines in actual sizes with proper registration marks. The same should be marked clearly in the dummy.