About a third of the files that arrive here would print badly. It is nearly always one of these five, and all five take minutes to fix.
I check every file that comes into this shop and about a third of them have something wrong. Almost none of it is the designer being careless. It is that nobody told them what a press needs, so here are the five faults I see every week.
No bleed. A trimming blade is accurate to about half a millimetre, not to the line, so artwork that stops exactly at the edge produces a white hairline on one or two sides of every piece. The fix is three millimetres of artwork past every trimmed edge. On a card with a coloured background this is the single most common reason a job looks cheap.
Wrong colour mode. Screens make colour with light, in RGB. Presses make it with ink, in CMYK. Some RGB colours cannot be mixed in ink at all, and the three that disappoint people most are bright green, electric blue and strong orange. Convert to CMYK yourself and look at what happens, because that is what will print, and if the green goes flat you want to know at your desk rather than when you collect five hundred flyers.
Resolution measured at the wrong size. A photograph that is 300 dots per inch at postcard size is 40 dots per inch on a two metre banner. What matters is the resolution at the finished size and the distance it will be read from: 300 for anything held in the hand, 150 for a poster, and 100 is honestly plenty for a banner read from across a road. People over specify banners and under specify cards, in about equal numbers.
Fonts not embedded. A PDF with linked fonts prints with whatever the machine substitutes, which moves every line of text and is sometimes not noticed until the job is boxed. Embed them, or convert the text to outlines, and then check the PDF on a computer that does not have the font installed.
And the logo from a chat. Messaging apps compress images, so a logo sent that way arrives about 400 pixels wide with soft edges. It is fine on a business card and it is a smear on anything larger. Ask whoever designed it for the vector file, which will be an AI, EPS, SVG or PDF. If the designer has vanished, we will redraw a simple mark for 450 rufiyaa, and it is worth it because you will need it again.
One last thing that is not a fault but costs money. Send the file before you ask for a price, not after. Half the time the check changes the quotation, because a job that needs the artwork rebuilding is a different job from one that is ready to run.
