Print Design TipsTips and Information About Printing

Postcards are one of the more efficient forms of advertising. You can use them in order to reach new customers, or to follow up with your current ones. Some products, such as Campbell’s Soup and Coca Cola, even became household brands due to their creative use of advertising postcards. It wasn’t long before many other companies were capitalizing on this idea by either sending cards through the mail or passing them out in various stores.

Creating advertising postcards wasn’t always possible for small businesses to do however. Nowadays the Internet and computers have made it quite inexpensive to develop and create your own postcards in order to promote your business. You have the option of mailing postcards or passing them out at local events for example. Both of these methods are relatively inexpensive and can really help to get the word out about your business.

Because of all the technological improvements made just over the past decade you are actually able to have your professionally made custom printed postcards created with state of the art technology. Whether you currently are a one person show operating out of your home, or have employees and an office, advertising postcards are a perfect place to get started creating your company image.

You will find that you will have no problems creating your new postcards with the high-quality designs that are available to even the most modest of budgets. For perhaps the first time, you do not have to be a large company to afford this type of advertising.

Get high quality postcard printing at Conquest Graphics for a discount price.

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.

If you are a beginner at graphic design or print design, then there are a few things that you can do in order to get off to a great start. First of all, you should be familiar with the bleeding technique. A bleed is when objects that are printed overlap the border of the document. Once the document is printed, it will have to be cropped so that it can fit onto the paper. It is recommended that you use a 3mm bleed on all four sides.

Next, it is important that you know what the minimum resolution is in order to produce professional images. The short answer to this question is in between 300 to 600 dpi. Whenever you print an image that is at a lower resolution than the original image, it is going to come out at a lower quality, but nobody will be able to tell if this is done correctly.

Another thing that you can do in order to improve your print design is to use a grid. It can help you stick with proportions and provide some helpful composition guidelines. While the three column set up is the most commonly used grid, feel free to experiment. Many people appreciate the different combinations they can achieve with a 7 column grid for example.

Finally, you will want to maintain proper typography. The font that you choose for each piece is a matter that should be carefully thought out instead of being picked at random. It is recommended that you choose 5 or so fonts that you think will be good for each piece, and see what it looks like using each of them.

Finally, it is always a good idea to include your web address in your print work. That way, it will be easier for your business to grow by word of mouth.

These basic concepts will be expounded on in future blog entries.

Pantone is a color matching system that was created so that colors can remain consistent no matter what medium is being used to view them. Color is interesting in the fact that it is highly subjective; what one person views as yellow, another may view as orange for example. Now, with the many different types of technologies we have to view colors, it is very important that each of them use the same colors. The Pantone matching system, PMS, is not the only system that exists for maintaining color consistency. It is, however, the most widely used.

A commercial printing company will keep a full supply of Pantone inks in their shops in order to ensure that they always remain consistent in the colors that they use for their printing projects. Take for example, a company that has a logo designed for them in a certain palette of colors. Then, they take this logo to a commercial printer to have some brochures posted. They want the logo on the brochures to match the same colors as the original. Imagine if when they got the completed brochures, that the logo used a completely different palette of colors?

Pantone colors are based on certain recipes that can be created by mixing together certain colors. Some cannot be created by mixing however, and must be purchased. These include colors such as metallics and fluorescent inks. One of the few problems that is involved is when Pantone colors are attempted during a 4 color printing process. This will not create accurate results. The only way that this can be accomplished successfully is to add Pantone as a fifth color which can be quite expensive. The 4 color printing process uses only the colors of magenta, cyan, yellow, and black, which is not enough to create a true Pantone color.