Cheap printing, discount printing, low cost printing. Delivering high quality printing to Australia, United States & United kingdom.
The importance of preparing your file correctly for print. Preparing your file correctly for output to either offset or digital printing is cirtical in achieving a high quality print result. Many designers do not adhere to the basic principles of file generation and file preparation that make life easier for everyone including us printers and you, our customers. It is critically important that files are submitted correctly to achieve optimal results. We will run by the correct way to set up a file from start to finish so that it is a "print ready" file.
Step One. Creating A Blank Document.
For the purposes of this excercise we are going to create a business card document, a product that we here at indieprint.com print everyday. We are going to use a standard size of 90mm x 55mm full bleed card. Firstly, go to file: New to create a new document.
Please note the settings we have used. The trimmed width of the card is 90mm, and the height is 55mm, plus we require a 3mm bleed the whole way around the card. The colour mode should be set to CMYK at a resolution of 300 dpi (PPI) minimum setting for optimum results. Click "OK". Your document should look like this (make sure you have your guides turned on via menu VIEW: GUIDES: SHOW GUIDES). The black like indicated the trimmed area, the red line indicates the line to where the elements of your business card should bleed out to should reach, such as the card background.
Step Two. Centering Your Document.
It is always a good idea when creating a new piece of art to know where the centre of your document is. To do this select your rectangle tool and click onto the artboard. Type in the finished size of your document, in this case it is 90mm x 55mm. It should look like this. Click "OK".
Take the rectangle you have just created and drag it to the corner of the document make sure your document is set to MENU: VIEW: SNAP TO POINT. When your rectangle of perfectly inlign with your trim area your cursor should look hollow. 
From this point go to MENU: VIEW: GUIDES: MAKE GUIDES. Doing this will give you a centre point to the document with which to work from. You can also drag your ruler lines across as we have done to give you a better idea of where centre is. To do this go to MENU: VIEW: SHOW RULERS. Your doument should now look like this.
Step Three. Inner Margin.
All too often fantastic artwork suffers from designers taking elements of their design way too close to the trim line. A common mistake for example is running text right up to the trim line. From the printers perspective this is bad and detracts from the over all printability of the artwork, and in some cases due to the slightly variable nature of trimming, can result in parts of words or images being chopped off needlessly. Care should be taken to avoid placing critical data in the TRIM ZONE (inner margin). In the case of our business card we require a 5mm inner margin. We will repeat the steps indated in Step Two, and create a 80mm x 45 mm retangle in our document, centre it, and create a guide out of it. 
Step Four. Placing artwork.
For our business card we have decided on a fancy blue coloured background, with a new corporate logo with all the customer details. We've made sure that the background placed is a CMYK image with a native setting of 300 dpi (that means the image is created at 300 dpi for best results; not changed to 300 dpi from 72 dpi where interpolation occurs. ie the image will look all fuzzy). Our text and logo all remain well within the inner margin we have set, so we know none of our critical elements are safe. We are now happy with our design and must make it ready for print.
Step Five. Creating Text Outlines.
There are many fonts out there in the market place and it is impossible for us to have them all on out computers. That is why we ask our customer to set their text to outlines. This will change the font to a vector with no font imformation necessary. To do this go to MENU: SELECT: ALL. Your art should be selected like this.
Step Six. Saving a print ready PDF.
Once we are satisfied that everything is OK and we are happy to send indieprint.com the file for printing we can go ahead and save it as a print ready PDF. To do this go to MENU: FILE: SAVE AS where a new window will come up. Make sure that the format you are saving is is set to PDF. Click SAVE.
A new window will come up it will look like the window below. There are a couple of settings you need to pay attention to. Firstly, Adobe PDF preset needs to be set to HIGHEST QUALITY PRINT. Secondly,and importantly make sure that "preserve Illustrator editing capabilities", and "optimize for fast web View" are checked. We need the editing capabilities to be checked for when we mposition your file to print. The window should look like this. We are nearly done.
Next stage is to click on the MARKS AND BLEEDS link on the side of the Save Adoine PDF screen. It will bring up the following window. Indieprint.com requires that you check the "All Printer's Marks" button, and also, importantly make sure that the Bleeds button is checked, this will ensure that the PDF saves your document with the bleed allowance we set up at the start of the procedure. Once these buttons are checked click SAVE PDF.
Step Seven. Viewing your PDF.
Once your PDF document has been saved, you can open it up in your PDF viewer. Hopefully if you have followed all the correct steps your PDF should look like the window below. If so, then you have created, and saved a print ready PDF ready to email to us at indieprint.com for printing. The same method should apply for all other print documents you wish to save, including A2 & A3 Posters, A4, A5 & A6 Flyers and postcards, DL flyers, stationary, booklets etc. For double sided printing save your document as something different, such as new-business-card-back and repeat the sequence from our Step Three.
Should you get stuck when creating artwork to submit for printing at indieprint.com please don't hesitate in contacting us today.