CDS Artwork GuidanceFor Web & Printing

Status: DRAFTDate: [Publish Date]

This Guide

Posters, Flyers and Programme or Web Image content will look much better (and be printed more easily) if some basic design guidelines are followed.

  • The aim is to make help produce good quality graphics on web or on paper!

This document provides some guidance on preparing artworkand theimages.

  • In this document Artwork means the printer ready (or near printer ready) file or files that are about to be printed as for example a poster or programme booklet.
  • An image can be either the whole of a piece of artwork (e.g. a poster), or just part of n piece of artwork (such as a photo within a programme), or an image can be used as part of a web page.

We are not trying to cover artistic issues or matters of taste, the purpose is to help avoid problems in creation and reproduction.

It covers two related but slightly different processes – firstly what is usually called “Desktop Publishing” - i.e laying out text and images on a page, but secondly what we will call “Image Editing”– which can cover adding text or shapes to an image, as well as adjusting overall or partial areas such as tone, hues, or red eye removal.

  • Some tools will do both – either well or badly, others are suitable for some tasks, but not others.

Contents

This Guide

Commercial Printing Considerations

In a nutshell

What Program to Use?

In a nutshell

Converting to PDF

In a nutshell

Paper or Canvas Sizes

In a nutshell

Design Tips

Glossary of Concepts

Commercial Printing Considerations

Commercial printers, especially those dealing with small companies and groups will often do their best to convert the rough and un-ready artwork or we give them in to as good a print run as possible.

However we can get best results by working with them, and trying to follow industry standards where possible and giving them a sufficiently high quality artwork file without too many compromises.

In a nutshell

  • PDF is the simplest format to provide to any printer. Although it can include the page size in the file printers can scale it if required subject to sufficient resolution and quality.
  • You can avoid most problems by having a ready to print design with a white border, and making sure that the artwork is of a sufficiently high resolution for the output size and purpose intended.
  • If your design carries on to the edge of the image and paper, then you need to consider bleed, margin and safe/trim zones.
  • If you have particular concerns on colour reproduction you may need to consider the limitations of CMYK colour reproduction (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) as opposed to RGB.

PDF is usually the best format to send to printers, especially for multi-page items such as programmes. PDF or a high resolution JPG, TIFF or PNG file may as or more suitable for single prints like posters or leaflets, depending on the printer’s preferences.

Most printers will not take application files such as .doc/.docx

What Program to Use?

In a nutshell

  • Unless you have access to top end professional software from Adobe you probably are best off using a desktop publisher program like MS Publisher or Scribus, for page layout.
  • For image or photo editing use a program like Paint.NET or GIMP.
  • For creating some images or designsa vector editing program like InkscapeorLibreOffice[1]Drawor MS Visiowill be more appropriate.
  • The free tools are quite capable, as the Microsoft Office[2] products – so but use what you know or have.
  • If you have a Mac then there will be other options alongside the Adobe range.

Why?

The best and most capable options for preparing artwork for Commercial Printers are probably Adobe InDesign, Photoshop orIllustratorand QuarkXPress as they support CMYK colours and colour printing processes much better.

But those cost money…

MS Word orPowerPoint and similar office suites like LibreOfficeWriter & Impress(the equivalent word processor and presentation tools) are not ideal for preparing for commercial printing. Their focus is on preparing documents or presentations although they can be adequate for simple items.

MS Publisher(which is part of MS Office)or the open source (free) Scribusare often better options – they are desktop publisher tools so are geared to moving content around on a page intended for printing (not an interactive screen display) and they have some support for issues such as Bleed and CMYK. Scribus can import text from MS Word or Libre Office as well from Microsoft Publisher.

Image Editing falls into two main categories.

i)Raster or Bitmap editors work on a grid of pixels. They are more suitable for retouching, photo processing, photorealistic illustrations, collage, and illustrations drawn by hand with a pen tablet. Adobe Photoshop is primarily a bitmap editor. Two good freely available bitmap editor options are Paint.Net for simple designs, or GIMP for more sophisticated processes. (The best place to install them from is ninite.com.)

ii)The category is vector editors. These are based on scalable geometric shapes and the relationships between them. They are often better for typography, logos, and creating sharp-edged artistic illustrations such as clipart. If you are drawing a shape or logo from scratch then a vector graphics editor may be the best tool.

There are some overlaps in functionality as some tools combine or include aspects of both types of editor. And desktop publishing software often includes some basic vector drawing tools but also allows insertionof bitmap graphics such as photos. So for designing for print you can always import an image or images into Publisher or Scribus to manipulate them and add and align text on a page design.

Converting to PDF

In a nutshell

  • Always export optimised for print or highest quality
  • Print optimized / Highest quality
  • If you can select the resolution set it to 600 dpi (300at a minimum)
  • Embed all fonts (VERY IMPORTANT!)
  • Selecting PDF/A or ISO 19005-1 will embed all the fonts if you don’t have an explicit option

Sometimes a program’s internal PDF conversion (eg Export to or Save As PDF) may not give the best quality.

  • If you have Adobe Acrobat Pro or Standard (not the free Acrobat Reader) you may be able to convert export your source file to PDF (from PostScript to PDF using its Distiller program). But if you have Adobe tools you probably don’t have a problem anyway!

If the PDF is uncompliant (gives errors) or is low quality you can

  • Try using a virtual pdf printer (such as PDFCreator, CutePDF or the one in Foxit Reader (all available from ninite.com.)
  • These may give finer grained control on paper size and the DPI settings for the printout

TIP: IN MS Word

In Export to PDF may be better than Save As (this may only be for older versions).

When exporting or savingas PDF select “Standard Publishing for Online & Printing” in the dialog box. Its Options button provides more choices, specifically for ISO 19005-1 to embed all the fonts

But as well as the options in the Save or Export dialog box there are also choices in the main Word Options (under the File menu)

Under Options, Advanced, Image Size and Quality

  • Chose the PPI for your default target output (the highest is 220ppi)
  • Also check Do Not Compress Images in file

And under Options, Advanced, Print

  • Do NOT check Draft Quality
  • Check Optimize for Standard (for publishing online and printing)

An MS Word “Feature”

Word scales images automatically depending on the paper size, so you need to increase it to increase the PDF's resolution, but the highest resolution Word will let the image quality be is 220dpi. (This kind of “help” is one reason why Word is not the best desktop publishing solution)

  • (The largest you can set your paper size is 55.87cm x 55.87cm – in Word 2007 anyway)

More MS WORD tips can be found here

In PowerPoint there are some similar options

  • See for some tips on publishing from a PowerPoint master.

Paper or Canvas Sizes

In a nutshell

  • Just make sure your resolution and aspect ratio are suitable for your intended output.
  • Some programs (MS Word, Publisher, Impress, Photoshop) will have a canvas size which is the physical dimensions of the final output. That should match (or be larger) than what you intend to print on.
  • There is no paper size for an image – just a set of dimensions in pixels. However you probably have an idea where your file will be used – as all or part of a poster, or on a web page.

Make sure your paper or canvas is set to the right proportions. MS Word and other tools default to US Letter page size – which is not the same aspect ratio as A4 or other ISO A series paper.

REMEMBER: All ISO A paper sizes are in the same proportions (based on or ~1.414 to 1) – so scaling down from one size to a smaller sheet is trivial.

If you have to use MS Word you may find you get a better result working on a larger page size or canvass – eg A3 or A2 which can then be reduced to a smaller size such as A4 when printing (see scaling).

TIP: If you use the default (US) Letter page size In Word then your canvas will not be the right proportions for A4 – it will have white space above or below, or will be stretched vertically to fit. Either way it looks is ugly!

TIP: In MS Word see Page Layout -> Size and select A4 or another ISO size, More Sizes, Custom Size, then enter the physical dimensions in mm from the table below.

TIP – if working in a raster drawing program it can be useful create a canvas based on the size of a much larger number of pixels but in the same proportion.

For example for an A3 poster a canvass that is 297 by 420 pixels will have one pixel per millimetre – so not a very high resolution ... try using 1682 x 2378 pixels, or 2970 by 4200 pixels,. Ten pixels per mm is about 250dpi, which is pretty reasonable. (300dpi = ~111dpcm or dots per cm)

Most printer and have information about minimum pixel dimensions for physical output printing on their websites.

They also often have templates for standard products, either in Adobe proprietary formats, but sometimes also in PDF. (Tip: LibreOffice Impress will display a PDF file).

Here are some suggested Pixel sizes from Vistaprint, at either 300 or 175 dpi.

Size Name / Trimmed Paper Size
(without bleed) / Dimensions at300dpi
(without bleed) / Drawing Size
(with bleed) / Dimensions in Pixels
(with bleed) / DPI
A6 / 148 x 105 mm / 1748 x 1240 / 151 x 108 mm / 1783 x 1275 / 300
A5 / 210 x 148 mm / 2480 x 1748 / 213 x 151 mm / 2517 x 1783 / 300
A4 / 210 x 297 mm / 2480 x 3508 / 213 x 300 mm / 2517 x 3544 / 300
A3 / 297 x 420 mm / 3508 x 4961 / 300 x 423 mm / 3544 x 4996 / 300
A2 / 420 x 594 mm / 2894 x 4093 / 424 x 598 mm / 2922 x 4120 / 175
A1 / 594 x 841 mm / 3508 x 4967 / 598 x 845 mm / 3508 x 4967 / 175
A0 / 841 x 1189 mm / 5794 x 8192 / 845 x 1193 mm / 5821 x 8219 / 175

And a table from Design2Print

See also their templates at

Design Tips

  • Try to keep text below 12pt in black whenever possible, as small coloured text may not look as sharp once printed.
  • Don’t use too many fonts and overload the reader. Try to use no more than two complementary font choices in one area.
  • Take care if vector RGB black (e.g. text) adjoins bitmap RGB black (e.g. from an image) in your design as the join will look extremely noticeable. The same issue will occur with other colours that may look similar on screen.
  • A “Quiet Border”, (i.e. an area where no text or logos should be present), of at least 5mm from the trimmed edge of your artwork is recommended. This will avoids the design looking too close to the edge of the page and will give your job a more professional appearance. (For A5 - A4 booklets a 10mm quiet border is recommended)

Glossary of Concepts

Aspect Ratio

  • This is the proportional relationship between an images width and height. It is commonly expressed as two numbers separated by a colon, as in 16:9, or 4:3.
  • This CDS bird is about 15:9 in size it its correct or natural aspect ratio

But if we squash it vertically to 15:10 it looks like this

In most cases when resizing an image you should use the option to preserve aspect ratio – so that when made say 50% narrower in width, it is also made 50% shorter in height.

Copyright

  • It is surprisingly easy to track uses of an image online. See Google Image Search or TinEye and try them out.
  • So don’t use copyright images.
  • Fonts are also licenced – although there are a wide variety available freely or free for non-commercial use. It may be possible to send these to the printers.

Bleed, Margin and Trim

  • As well as resolution and colour rendition the most common issues in submitting artwork for commercial printing are: Bleed, Margin and Trim.
  • These are related terms to providing a design that can be cleanly printed when the edge of the design extends off the edge of the paper. You can avoid any problems by having your design with a white border of at least 8mm all the way around.
  • If you want to design to the edge of the paper then you need to allow for these values – using either the printing company’s template or specification, or industry standards.
  • TRIM is where the design will be trimmed/cut – Text or lines too close to the trim can look bad - 8mm avoids most issues
  • BLEED is the area to be trimmed off – your design should continue this far so that it reaches the cut edge! (3mm bleed is standard!)
  • MARGIN is the safe zone inside the trim area - keep anything you don’t want to risk cutting off inside the margin

Online Images

  • Most of our online images are on the WordPress based website, or the main social media platforms.
  • For images and banners across the top of website pages a width of 1200 pixels is about the widest we can use – in the main and side columns narrower sizes. 600 in the main and 300 or so in the side columns.
  • Larger images can be displayed (for example by clicking on a photo for a full size original), but there is little point in having images too large for any screen to display.
  • Website images can be compressed to save download time and help web site response, and should be scaled to the optimum size(this is not important for social media)
  • Web images don’t usually need be stored or viewed at more than 72dpi.

Resolution, Pixels or Dots per Inch

  • All photos and most image files are made up of pixels or dots in the image
  • Strictly speaking resolution is measured in PPI or DPI, (Pixels or Dots per Inch) – so it can only be measured when an image is printed or displayed.
  • An image of 640x480 pixels may look fine on screen or printed at say 4 x 3 cm size, (about 400dpi) but will look awful printed at a size of 16 x 12cm (about 100dpi).
  • But the more dots or pixels there are, the better the image quality at any size so we often say an image of 500x500 pixels is higher resolution than one of 100x100.
  • When you receive, create or manipulate an image file it will have a dimensions of the number of pixels in width x height.
  • E.g. 248x 350 pixel
  • Some software will store an expected or assumed DPI and show the print size at that DPI – that only applies if you print it at the expected size!
  • In general keep images in a high a resolution as possible (more pixels, and a high jpg ratio)
  • However larger sizes are more unwieldy as files get exponentially larger
  • For printing resolution typically needs to be at least 250dpi, and 300dpi is the most common standard figure. (Vistaprint suggest at least 175dpi)
  • If you print a A4 300dpi image (2480 x 3508 pixel) then it should look OK, but at A3 the resolution drops to 150pi, at A2 it’s 75dpi.

Compression & Quality

  • As well as resolution the data in images can be compressed. If like in PNG and most TIFF formats information is not thrown away the compression is called losseless.
  • JPG files are a lossy compression however as they reduce the information stored and for example by ignoring some subtle changes in textures. This loss of quality in an image may or may not be perceivable by the observer.
  • High levels of JPG compression will produce artefactsor visible "blocking", into patches of similar tile-like squares, loss of apparent sharpness especially on edges and other compromises on fine detail and range of colour tones.

Colours (CMYK vs RGB)

  • Bear in mind that for colour reproduction CMYK (printed inks) has less scope than RGB (screencolours) – photos and specific “brand” colours will typically have the most issues
  • Printers often require CMYK colours but will usually convert from RGB but colour accuracy may vary! You can also convert final artwork images to CMYK with some free online tools.
  • Printers will usually send a PDF proof in CMYK format if they have had to convert it. The main limitations are for brighter colours – ink does not glow as well as an LCD display!
  • Depending on your sources you may also need to be careful about blacks. The K in CMYK is a pure black ink, but some software or images may mix CMY colours to make a near black that is almost but not quite the same. This isn’t usually an issue if using a raster graphics tool like GIMP or paint.net.

Scaling