One of the most important steps to choosing the best custom printer to print your marketing collaterals is the turnaround time – or how long will it take your custom printing company to get you the results you want. The faster it takes for them to complete your print job, the more chances it would be for you choose them from the rest of the custom printers in your shortlist.
But reality check here. The responsibility of getting your print job finished on time not only rests on your custom printing company. It is also your responsibility to make sure that they start it right immediately. And the means for your custom printer to do that is if you can get your print files ready for printing right away.
Of course, your custom printer would first look at the print file you submit to them to make sure that it is compliant to their required ready file for printing. If not, they would have to modify and manipulate it to meet the standards of their printing process. And then that's the only time they would be able to send it to their printing system. This again, would be one of the reasons why your print job might take some time for your printer to finish. If you want your print job completed at the exact schedule you want, then one of the things you can do is make sure that you get your files ready for printing according to your printer's specifications.
Having your files ready for custom printing is fairly easy. You don't need to be a scientist or anything of the sort to complete the process as it is not rocket science. With a few simple guidelines, you can make your print file ready even as early as the inception of your design.
Have the right resolution.
It is very important to make sure that you have the right resolution, which for commercial printers are usually as high as possible. 300dpi resolution would just not do as it is the minimum resolution requirement. Ask your printer for their requirement so you can avoid losing the quality of your pictures when they give you the final print.
Have consistency in colors.
When printing, you have to remember that commercial printers usually ask for CMYK colors rather than RGB, the latter being the color that you see in your computer screen or a web page. Well, they don't go for that. If you want to have your images looking sharp in your print job, use CMYK for your pictures even at the start of your design.
Have the guidelines for trim and bleeds.
These two would be the areas around your dimensions that would make it safe for your images and content to not be cut once the trimming is done at the final process. According to standard design procedures, leave at least ¼ inch between the edge of your dimensions and the edge of your image, text or any other important feature in your marketing materials. This is so they won't be cut when the time comes for your printer to trim your material into the size that you require.
Don't compress your images if you can.
The less you compress, the better it would be for your final design. Use a TIFF format for your print file so you can keep the original information of your elements intact.
Finally, save your file in the standard format that your printer requires. Or if you don't have the format that your printer specifies, then you can always go for the standard file format commonly used by all printers. One such way to do this is to "lock" your print file using Adobe® Acrobat® PDF. What you have in your "locked" file would be the final layout that you will see when you have the final output.
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