How to Prepare Print-Ready Artwork: A Five-Point Checklist

Run through these before you send anything. In order of how often they cause problems:

1. Resolution — 300 dpi at final printed size.The “at final size” part is what people miss. A 300 dpi image is only 300 dpi at the dimensions it was saved at; scale it up 400% in your layout and it is effectively 75 dpi. Check resolution at the size it will actually print.

2. Colour mode — CMYK, not RGB. Presses print in CMYK. An RGB file gets converted somewhere in the process, and if nobody reviews that conversion, saturated colours shift. See CMYK vs RGB.

3. Bleed and safe area — 3 mm each.Background artwork extends 3 mm past the trim; text stays 3 mm inside it. See what print bleed is.

4. Fonts — embedded or outlined.If a font is neither, the printer’s system substitutes something else and your layout reflows. Outlining converts text to shapes, which is bulletproof but means the text can no longer be edited — so keep an editable master copy.

5. Format — PDF. Specifically a print PDF with bleed and marks included, not a screen-optimised export.

Resolution is a relationship between pixels and physical size, not a property of a file on its own. A 3000×2000 pixel image is 300 dpi when printed at 10×6.67 in, and 150 dpi when printed at 20×13.3 in. Same file, half the quality, because you doubled the size.

The practical check:divide your image’s pixel dimensions by the printed size in inches. If the answer is 300 or above, you are fine. Between 200 and 300 is usually acceptable for large-format work viewed at a distance. Below 150 will look visibly soft.

Large format is the exception. A billboard or a large banner is viewed from metres away, so 100 dpi or less at final size can be perfectly acceptable. Requiring 300 dpi on a 10-foot banner would mean an unusably enormous file. Tell us the viewing distance and we will tell you what resolution you actually need.

You cannot add resolution back. Upscaling a small image in Photoshop invents pixels; it does not recover detail. AI upscaling is better than it used to be but still guesses. Always start from the largest original you have.

Raster images (JPG, PNG, TIFF) are grids of pixels. They have a fixed resolution and degrade when enlarged. Photographs are inherently raster.

Vector images (AI, EPS, SVG, and vector content inside a PDF) are mathematical descriptions of shapes. They are resolution-independent — the same file prints perfectly on a business card and on the side of a van.

Your logo should be vector. Not because vector is better in general, but because a logo gets used at wildly different sizes across your business — a business card, a shirt, a vehicle, a building sign. A raster logo forces a compromise at one end of that range.

Vector is also required, not merely preferred, for cut vinyl and embroidery digitizing, because both need actual paths to follow rather than pixels to interpret.

If your logo only exists as a raster file, our vectorization service has a designer redraw it as clean vector artwork — a one-time job you then own for every future application. See also PNG vs vector.

The most common export failure is setting up bleed in the document and then not ticking the box to include it on export. The bleed area is silently discarded and you have done the work for nothing.

In InDesign and Illustrator, in the PDF export dialog, go to Marks and Bleeds and enable Crop Marks and Use Document Bleed Settings. Use a press-quality preset rather than the smallest-file-size one, which downsamples images aggressively.

Flatten transparency carefully or not at all. Modern workflows handle live transparency fine, but drop shadows and blend modes exported through an old flattener can produce visible boxes or banding. If you see odd rectangles around shadows in your exported PDF, that is what happened.

Always open your exported PDF and look at it before sending. Check the page count, that fonts render correctly, that images have not gone soft, and that the bleed is actually there. Two minutes here catches most problems.

There are two blacks in CMYK and using the wrong one is a genuinely common, genuinely visible mistake.

100% K (black ink only) is correct for body text. It prints crisp and registers perfectly because only one plate is involved.

Rich black (black plus percentages of cyan, magenta and yellow) is deeper and is what you want for large solid black areas. A large area of 100% K alone looks washed out and slightly grey next to a rich black.

The mistakes go both ways. Small text set in rich black can look fuzzy, because four plates must register perfectly on fine detail and any tiny misregistration shows as colour fringing. A large background in flat 100% K looks weak.

Rule of thumb: text in 100% K, large solid areas in rich black. If you are not sure what values to use for rich black, ask — the right build depends on the press and the stock, and we would rather tell you than have you guess.

Send us what you have. Genuinely — this guide exists so you can get it right if you want to, not as a barrier to ordering.

We check colour mode, resolution, bleed, fonts and black builds as part of prepress on every job. If something needs fixing and it is straightforward, we fix it. If it is a problem that would change how the piece looks — a logo that is too low-resolution for the size you want, for example — we tell you at quote stage, before anything is printed.

What we will not do is print a file we can see is going to disappoint you and let you find out when the box arrives.