During the production of paper products, slight cutting imperfections are to be expected – cutting can be off by a couple of millimeters from the cutting line. To allow leeway for such imperfections, you should add 3 mm of bleed on all edges of your artwork. Make sure all colors, background pictures, and elements extend to the edge of the bleed area, to avoid the appearance of white borders on certain edges after cutting. Learn more how to set up the bleed here.

To ensure that no important elements (text, graphics, images) get cut off from your paper product, make sure to keep such elements at least 3 mm away from the edge of your finished product dimensions. Click here to know how to set up 3 mm safety margin.

Except for silkscreen and pad printing, files should be prepared in CMYK colour mode. Keep in mind that if the setup is wrong, colours on the finished product may differ from the file you sent. Here is how to set your artwork to CMYK colour mode in Adobe Illustrator.

To avoid blurriness, use only images and graphics that have a resolution of 300 DPI or more at actual size. Before sending your files, make sure to embed your images into the file. Read more about how to check the resolution of your assets.

When setting up grey elements, set the black color (K) to a percentage between 0 and 100, and keep all other colors (C, M, and Y) equal to 0%.

When setting up black text, thin lines and small elements, use pure black, (i.e. C = 0, M = 0, Y = 0, K = 100). Text, thin lines, and small elements in pure black color should be set to overprint to avoid white gaps around the text. It will give a solid edge to those elements.

If lines are 2 pt thick or less, use only 1 or 2 colours. 4 colours may be used for thicker lines.

To avoid issues with fonts when submitting your file(s), make sure to convert fonts to outlines, or to embed all fonts when saving to PDF.

The best format for submitting print-ready files is PDF, under the PDF/X-1a standard. Where possible, submit your files in PDF format. See why PDF/X-1a is the right format for printing.

Make sure that no elements are set on overprint, unless you need them to be.