Choosing Your Print Colours

Important Graphic File Technical Information
Your graphic design (logos, illustrations, print layouts and more) can be delivered to you in the following popular formats and more.

WEB IMAGE FORMATS

1. In 72 dpi (resolution) suitable for website placement as a .gif or .jpg file. Please do not attempt to use these for print.

A web quality .gif or .jpeg file type cannot be resized in any way without it suffering distortion and blurring, and must be used in their original size.

PRINTABLE IMAGE FORMATS

2. In high resolution 300dpi (dots per inch) suitable for printing usage as a .JPEG (sits on a white background) file and a .PNG (sits on a transparent background). These can be inserted as an image into programmes such as MS Word, printed in high quality and be resized smaller without loss of quality.

3. As a resizable vector file print format. The sorts of files we may give you that are in vector format include EPS, AI (Adobe Illustrator) and PDF. Typically we provide PDF.

The EPS, AI or PDF file types are classed as a master file and should be retained. This is the file type you should hand over if a designer or printing company asks for your design file. This file does not need resizing ...it is completely 'scalable'.

4. Other file types (any that are exportable from Adobe Illustrator) are also available at no extra cost however you will find the files listed above will cover all situations you need for web and print.

YOUR GRAPHIC AS IT APPEARS ON THE INTERNET

You should be aware that computer screens do not provide a true representation of print colour.
They can only display 'web colours' and what we see on our screen can show up on your own monitor as a different colour because each pc monitor displays colour differently.

IMPORTANT: Your logo or graphic design when viewed on screen may be a slightly different colour when printed out.

ACHIEVING PREDICTABLE PRINT COLOURS

Although you will have been provided with an .PDF vector file and a JPEG, and the JPEG is suitable for producing good quality printing from word processing software such as Microsoft Word, you may also decide to take your logo or graphic design to a commercial printing company to produce professional stationery, in this scenario you should hand over your PDF/EPS/AI file type rather than the JPEG.

Before embarking on professional printing it's vital to understand the printing colour methods available to you;

CMYK Colour Printing (Process colours - used with digital printing)

Colour is produced on your choice of printed material (paper, vinyl, cardboard, fabric and so on........) by mixing four separate ink colours:

Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (CMYK).

Using this method can mean that when printing many copies of the same artwork, as is common with business cards and other forms of stationary, some areas of colour may not appear completely consistent, consistency is affected by ink density, temperature, paper quality, and when using CMYK the colour can differ between printing companies.

If it's a cmyk colour print you have commissioned with your printing firm (very popular now as this is the method digital printing uses, and digital printing is very competitively priced and allows short runs) you can view the colours in a PDF document of your design - you must print the design out in 'best' quality from your printer to view the colours.

If you do this you will find that the print run should be pretty close to these as your office printer will print out using the CMYK printing method......however we can't guarantee they will be exactly the same as paper type and the laminating process (commonly used with business cards) or gloss paper can change the shade slightly on printed colours, as well as the heat at the time of print and so on.

Spot Colour Printing

If you wish to ensure that your logo design or graphic design colour will print exactly the same on every single printed copy you can specify what is called a 'spot colour', they are also guaranteed to look the same no matter which firm prints them.

There are a few spot colour systems available, but the industry standard is the Pantone Matching System, each Pantone colour has a code - for example PANTONE DS 221 - 8U is a pale blue colour; colours can be selected from swatch books that display these colours and list the codes for each one (remember that when looking at a pantone colour on a computer monitor it can look different from when printed and different depending on which monitor you are looking at, and only by viewing a 'swatch book' can you see the actual colour as it will print).

Another factor to bear in mind is that ink will look different if it's printed on a matte paper as opposed to glossy paper - but often printers will have a 'glossy swatch book' and a 'matte swatch book' showing your chosen pantone colour on each type of paper, some printers will have further swatches available such as your colour in 'metallic'.

You cannot view Pantone colours by printing a design file from your own office printer as an office printer only prints in cmyk - therefore if you wanted Pantone printing the only way to select the colours is to go into a printing shop and look at their Pantone colour books. Obviously if you don't use a printer in your locality (selecting remote online printing firms is very popular) you can't look at a colour chart and select your colours from this.

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Can You Change Your Mind?

Your logo is created in Adobe Illustrator, which is professional design software and your logo always starts its life as an .eps vector file, and can be altered to suit your requirements.

If your logo has been created using CMYK colours or Pantone colours (feel free to specify which you prefer during the design process), and at a later stage you go to a printing company and decide you wish to have your logo in a different colour type you can simply advise us of either the CMYK colour details that your printer can provide you with, or you can provide us with the exact Pantone colour reference required for the different colours on your logo or graphic design.

We can make the amendments free of charge as part of your life time support. Alternatively it is possible your printer will be happy to make these amendments on the .eps file for you free of charge (it is a quick and simple process), before commencing your printing job.

If you have any questions on the above free free to speak to us further on the matter.

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