There aren’t really a whole bunch of tips and tricks to share, as this site is primarily designed for experienced graphic designers who understand the various terminologies associated with professional offset printing. IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are NOT familiar with terms like “full bleed”, “CMYK” or “DPI”, our print site could wind up being a little daunting for you. Yikes!

It’s also important to note that while we offer the best customer support in the industry, ours is a self-service website which caters to the trade. What that means is, while we provide very clear and concise information to those who work within the industry, we cannot offer training and/or phone support to some pf you who may be brand new to graphic design. LOL! Don’t take that the wrong way! There are many terrific support forums on the internet for those who are just starting out. You can easily find information regarding the technologies and terminologies used in the entire printing process. It’s just that in order to offer the absolute lowest prices, there’s no way to have the support personnel in place to handle the very basic of questions.

We do, however, have a few tips that we believe can be very helpful for even the most experienced of designers. Below, you’ll find some of those tips. In the meantime, if you have any of your own you’d like to share, please send them our way! We’d love to hear from you!

Yes, you can use the standard 300 dpi in your layouts, but your results will look noticeably better if you switch to 350 dpi or higher.

All artwork MUST be converted to CMYK prior to uploading for print. If it isn’t, you’ll receive notification of that fact, and your project will be delayed.

If you’ve ever used offset printing, one thing you may have noticed is that there are certain colors which reproduce fairly accurately, and some colors that do not! ALL COLORS will print darker than what you see on your monitor (depending on how it’s calibrated, of course). The reason for this is simple. Your monitor is a LIGHTED device, which means every color is brightly illuminated right there in front of you...and printed materials can only reflect light, which can never be as bright!

The other problem with color-matching is that your monitor is an RGB device, meaning that it uses only Red, Green and Blue to create every other color in the spectrum. Offset printing, on the other hand, uses CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) inks to produce all of its colors. It’s this difference in color schemes that makes it literally impossible for the final printed pieces to perfectly match what you’ve been viewing on your monitor. You can get very close...especially if you calibrate your monitor correctly (see below). But there will always be some difference.

Yellows can be especially tough because your monitor can’t even produce a “real” yellow! They’re all fake! LOL! There’s no yellow color gun on an RGB monitor, so it’s actually made from reds, greens and blues. However, yellow is one of the ink colors used during the printing process. This is why some flesh tones have a slightly yellowish tint if you’re not careful.
 

The only way to ensure that your printed pieces come out looking like your actual design, is to calibrate your monitor for each printer you use on a regular basis! Everyone uses different machines, ink types, and calibration methods. As a result, we highly recommend that you place a small order for a multi-color piece (with photos), and adjust your monitor so that you’ll have the confidence that on all future projects, what you see on screen is what you’ll actually get when printed!