5 Most Important Thing You Need To Know About printing

Creating a right graphic design takes a lot of time and efforts. Designer can’t afford it to look ruined when printed on packages. Hence there are 5 important things you need to know about printing to save your efforts :

1. Resolution: Resolution of the printer is an important factor. If the resolution of file is not good then the prints will be blurry, muddy and incoherent. DPI, dots per inch is the most important measure when it comes to print output. It decides the number of dots printer will print on one square inch of the printed page. For best results, set maximum DPI of 300 in your software. Higher DPI are of no use, it will make file very large and unmanageable. DPI and PPI are two different terms used in case of printing. PPI is pixel per inch which is related to density of dots in a square inch of screen space. PPI is used for digital designs, not for print designs.

2. RGB and CMY: the system that computer software use for generating colour on screen and printer use for printing are totally different. Computer graphics use RGB color scheme whereas printers use CMYK . RGB color system is made up of red, green and blue and CMYK has cyan, magenta, yellow and black colours. If your designs are going to be used digitally only then set your software to RGB and if it is to be printed then use CMYK.

3. Design scaling: It is important to consider how your design scales when it’s printed. It may happen that the design looks perfect on screen but when it is printed on much bigger surface or smaller surface it is ruined. When you have to print on smaller surfaces just like in case of business cards, pay serious attention to typography. Text on business cards should be easy to read, you should avoid thin and light fonts to achieve this. In case of large surfaces also this issue in design scaling occurs. For raster images, printing and packaging companies should choose high resolution to avoid blurring whereas vector images won’t face such problem as they are infinitely scalable.

4. Don’t forget bleed: Printing and packaging companies should not forget to leave a little room around the edge of designs as room for error, it is called bleed. This is done because the way printer cuts the paper is not definite. Usually design software show you where bleed starts and finishes. Amount of bleed is different for every printer.

5. Proofreading: You simply can’t afford to make silly mistakes while printing your design in physical form. Its wastage of money because can’t go back and correct it like you can do on web. Proofreading of the content before printing is extremely necessary for printing and packaging companies. Spellchecking can’t carry out the whole job, it will skip grammatical mistakes. You need to check punctuation, spellings of proper nouns and definitely check for wrong usage of homophones like “your” and “you’re”.

These are very fundamental rules to follow about printing.