Basic Print Guidelines

Printing requires some very different methods to produce quality designs that reflect well on you and your business. Image file types are different, and file sizes are much larger.

For example, a 1 inch by 1 inch print image has 90,000 pixels, where the same image used on a web page would have only 5184 pixels, or roughly 1/18 as large. The smaller image on the web page would look perfect, but would look fuzzy if used in a print piece. Similarly, the large image would take too long to download for such a small bit of a web page, and would also look fuzzy, as it would have to be scaled as well.

Images for print should be 300 pixels per inch, in other words, that 1 inch by 1 inch image needs to be 300 by 300 pixels. Images are best provided to printers in a TIFF format, which has good compression with no loss. Vector designs originating in applications like Illustrator or Freehand should be exported to EPS format for inclusion in print designs.

Fonts can be an issue as well. If a print design is delivered to your printer in any design format, i.e. Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator or even Microsoft Word, if the version of font the printer has is different than yours, the text can re-flow and change the location of design elements as they are related to the copy.

In the old days, this was a real problem. Today, the standard is to supply PDF files to a printer. Images, fonts, and all formatting is preserved. A file printed from a PDF will look exactly the same as the source file.

Last updated Monday, April 9, 2012 1:11 PM