When preparing images for printed materials always remember that poorly formatted images will not look crisp and clear once they have been printed. Therefore, a press release you send will potentially end up being less likely to be published in print media. Or the business cards you ordered may end up not looking as good as you had hoped for.
There are four main aspects of preparing images for printed materials:
When taking photographs with a camera or mobile phone the pictures will be digital images. That means they will be saved on your device unless they are actually printed out on photographic paper. The device, and its settings, will determine the how the digital file is formatted.
When preparing images for printed materials such as business cards, pens, tee shirts etc., the file size ideally needs to be measured in mm or cm. Most printers will have templates that you can download to ensure the correct dimensions are used in your artwork.
There are two methods of altering image sizes:
You will also need to take into account ‘bleed’ lines. These are lines that any key content on the image must not go beyond. Bleed itself is an extra bit of image or background colour that extends beyond the trim area of your printing item. And your text needs to sit within the lines, otherwise it can be left off when the printed items are being cut to size.
For images that are printed in newspaper and magazine etc. there is no need to use or worry about bleed lines.
As important as the image file’s dimensions are, the image file’s size is what is critical to the quality of your printed item or items. The image’s files size needs to be much larger that an image that is going to be displayed on the internet.
Images for print must be at least 300 dpi and large enough to fit the space they will occupy on the printed item.
Let us say that your image is going be 12cm wide x 5 cm high and designed to fit the space where it will be printed. For example, your logo on a tee shirt. But, if the resolution is not high enough the printed logo will still be poor quality.
The logo artwork therefore needs to be 12cm wide x 5 cm high AND at least 300 dpi.
When preparing images for printed materials ready to supply them to a printing company they will need to know where the images are intended to go on the printed item. Therefore ideally you need to name the files so that the printer understands exactly what they are working with.
The same applies when sending image files to accompany a press release to a print media publisher. They will also need to know where the images are intended to go in the printed article.
Some examples:
The type of file that the printer requires will depend on the size of the item that is being printed. They should let you know exactly what file types they require and can work with. For example, a business card up to a large poster can be in formats such as the following:
Whereas van livery and signage will need to be much bigger and in formats such as the following:
If you would like to see your organisation featured here, please complete our Spotlight Business Form and apply.
