Artwork guide

How to send files

Upload artwork on the product page when you order, or tick "send artwork later" and email it to sales@youprintqa.com with your order number. We accept PDF, AI, EPS, SVG, PNG and TIFF up to 20 MB. Print-ready PDF is the format we prefer, because it carries the fonts, the colour space and the trim information in one file and cannot shift between your screen and ours.

Resolution and colour

  • Place raster images at 300 dpi at final printed size. A 72 dpi web image scaled up will print soft no matter how good the press is.
  • Build files in CMYK. RGB artwork gets converted, and bright screen greens, blues and oranges lose saturation in the process. Convert it yourself if you want to see the shift before we do.
  • If a brand colour has to match exactly, give us the Pantone reference and we will run it as a spot colour where the process allows. Tell us early, because it changes the price.
  • Large solid blacks look flat in 100% K alone. Use a rich black build, or ask us what to use for your material.

Bleed, margins and fonts

  • Add 3 mm bleed on every edge that runs off the cut, and extend background colours and images into it.
  • Keep text, logos and barcodes at least 4 mm inside the trim, and further away from creases and glue flaps where the board folds.
  • Outline or fully embed every font. Missing fonts are the most common reason a job stalls in prepress.
  • Keep the dieline on its own layer, set to overprint or non-printing, and do not move it.

Dielines

Ask for the dieline before your designer starts. It is free, it is drawn for the exact size and material you have chosen, and it shows cut lines, crease lines and the glue and tuck areas that must stay clear of important artwork.

What the free prepress check covers

A person opens every file. We check that artwork sits on the dieline correctly, that bleed and margins are right, that fonts and links are present, that resolution holds at final size, and that colours are set up the way the job is priced. We then email a digital proof for your sign-off. Nothing is printed until you approve it.

What we cannot fix

We cannot add detail to a low-resolution image, recover a font we do not have, redraw a logo supplied only as a small JPEG, or guarantee a screen colour we were never given a reference for. We also cannot correct spelling or content errors that survive your proof approval, so read the proof carefully.