Artwork Guidelines for Digital Printing

…It can be done!

Have your art department or design agency follow our Digital File Guidelines to reduce the amount of time needed to prepare your files for printing. Less time equals less dollars spent! It’s that easy.

If needed, our art department will make any corrections to your supplied files to make them print ready. Our art time is billed at $55.00 per hour. We will always contact you before making the corrections so that we can obtain your permission for the extra charges.

True Type Font	Postscript Font
Used universally on PC and Mac Platforms.	Mac platform. Must have both the screen & printer fonts included to work properly.

Fonts
In most cases we prefer that fonts be converted to outlines or paths, if that option isn’t available please be sure to send your font files with your art. PC fonts are okay too, we have the tools to convert them to Mac format! In the event that fonts aren’t included with your art we will search our library for the needed font(s) – although rare, we may have to ask you to send a font that isn’t in our database.

Linked Files
Please be sure to include all linked images and art that have been imported into your page layout program.

Image Resolution and Color Space
Photoshop, eps and tiff files should be supplied at 100% of final size at a resolution of 150 pixels per inch. If possible, send the original layered file along with a flattened eps or tiff. Images should not be compressed with JPEG, GIF or LZW options or ugly little “artifacts” become embedded into the image. Always build your image files in CMYK color space. Duotones should always be built in Photoshop, never force duotone color on greyscale images in Quark or Illustrator.

Weird Programs/Applications
Using the traditional graphics programs noted above is the best way to submit your files to us. We can open files created in Microsoft Word and other non-traditional programs but we must recreate the file in a graphics application before we can send it to our imaging devices.

Disks & Media
We can accept your digital files on CD-Rom, Zip Disk, Floppy Disk, via email or we can download file from your website or FTP server. Please include a color hard copy of your project, if sending a black and white hard copy all element should be marked for colors. Art sent via email or other electronic means should include a PDF or JPEG image of your design.

Custom Gradients
Please build all color gradients in Illustrator or Photoshop using a gradient fill for a selected object. Do not use Illustrator’s Gradient Tool or build your gradient in Quark, both of those methods use a stepped gradient that will cause banding and put a huge processor load on our RIP equipment which may crash the RIP or cause serious problems with the final gradient.