Print Design TipsTips and Information About Printing

If you are looking for ways to promote your small business, then you really can’t go wrong with custom printing. The first step to promoting any business is to create your identity. Business cards are the simplest way to begin this and most companies make use of them. The business card can help to create your identity by creating the appearance of a larger, more prestigious company. Small business owners can use these to help people learn about their business and even to network with other professionals.

The next step to creating this identity would be to have some custom printed magnets, business checks, and rubber stamps. It is always best to have a separate bank account for your business with its own custom printed checks. Having custom printed designs on the company car can really help to spread the word about your business as well.

You can also help to improve your company identity with your employees as well. Since everybody that works for the company is a representative, it is important that they always make a good impression. Custom printing is also needed when designing the company uniform if applicable.

Last but not least, now more than ever it is important to put forth a good impression with a well-designed Web site. Printing firms are often branching out into this realm these days as they are related. Having a poorly designed Web site can immediately turn off potential customers, especially if the site is difficult to navigate.

Bleed is a word used in print design in order to explain when printing expands over the edges of the document. Every printer has some kind of bleed set on the sides of the document so that the printer has a small amount of space to move around the paper. It is possible for you to change the bleed settings on your printer should you need to do so for a certain project. Otherwise, the default, and most widely used bleed is at 3mm.

Each country has its own way of measuring the bleeds though, so this depends on the rules that your country uses. The United States and the United Kingdom both use inches to measure bleeds, so the standard bleed in these countries is 1/8 inch from the area that is to be cut. While in Europe, millimeters are used and 3mm to 5mm is the default measurement for bleeds.

The length of bleed that you want for your finished project will depend largely on what you are printing. For example, let’s say you are printing a 4×6 postcard. The graphics and image should be extended by 1/8 of an inch on all sides. The image itself should be created with a measurement of 4.25 inches by 6.25 inches. Then, once the postcard has been printed out, the 1/8 inch bleed will be trimmed, leaving you with the finished product.

The reason why leaving some room for a bleed is so important is due to the fact that it allows you some room for error. There are many possible errors that could occur during the printing process. For example, the wrong size paper could be used, or the cropping machine could even be set up wrong. Images will not be aligned as nicely if you do not allow for a bleed either.

There are many different graphic file formats that you can use to save images on your personal computer. These include: TIFF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TARGA, and ICO. Each of these formats has its own pros and cons, and one is not necessarily better than the others. Instead, they each have their own situations that they are best suited for. The most used ones include JPEG, GIF, and PNG. The others are not used nearly as often.

Perhaps one of the oldest and most widely used graphic file format is GIF, or Graphic Interchange Format. GIF images use a palette of 256 colors, because of this they usually have a small size and are great for background images for websites. You can also make GIF images transparent quite easily which can make them even better suited for backgrounds. However, people who create programs using GIF images are required to pay licensing fees. It is because of this that PNG images were created.

The PNG graphic file format, or portable network graphics, was created as a patent-free answer to the GIF format. In all actuality however, it is superior to GIF in many ways. For example, a PNG file can be compressed by 5 percent to 25 percent more than a GIF image can. PNG images can be made transparent as well, and the user also has better control over how transparent the image becomes.

Finally, there is the JPEG format, which stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. These images are created in such a way that they may be compressed to 1/10 of their original size. When JPEG is used for print design, it is recommended that you save it at 100 percent quality however, so that the end product looks as nice as possible. JPEG compression is much more noticeable once it has been printed out than it is while it is still onscreen.