Start with a Conversation, Not a File

Before you open your design software, have a quick chat with your printer. It sounds obvious, but it is the single most effective way to avoid a stressful reprint. Tell them what you are producing — a run of 500 business cards, a folded leaflet, a banner for a trade show — and ask what they need. Most UK printers will happily send a short spec sheet or talk you through their preferences on file format, bleed and colour. Every press is set up slightly differently, and what works perfectly for one might cause a headache for another.

If you are working with a designer, loop them into that conversation early. If you are doing it yourself in Canva, Affinity Publisher or Adobe InDesign, the same principles apply. Getting the setup right at the start takes ten minutes; fixing it after a print run has gone wrong takes considerably longer.

Bleed and Crop Marks: The Basics That Trip Everyone Up

Bleed is the extra margin of artwork that extends beyond the finished edge of your printed piece. When your leaflet is trimmed, the guillotine cuts through that extra area rather than exactly on the artwork edge. Without bleed, a tiny misalignment leaves you with a sliver of white paper running down the side of a full-colour design. It looks unprofessional and it cannot be fixed after the fact.

The standard bleed in the UK is 3mm on every edge, though large-format work sometimes calls for more — check with your printer. Set this up in your document settings before you begin, not by nudging elements outwards at the end. Anything that should run to the edge of the page — a background colour, a photograph, a coloured band — must extend fully into the bleed area.

• Keep all text and logos at least 5mm inside the trim line, and ideally 10mm if you want a comfortable, uncluttered look.
• Turn crop marks on when exporting. These thin lines sit outside the bleed and tell the printer exactly where to cut.
• Never add your own crop marks manually by drawing lines — use the export settings in your software.
• Add the bleed to your finished size when setting up the document. An A5 leaflet is 148 × 210mm finished, but your artboard should be 154 × 216mm with bleed.

Colour Modes: CMYK, RGB and the Pantone Question

Screens glow. Paper reflects. This fundamental difference is why your design can look vivid on your monitor and slightly muted when it comes back from the printer. Anything destined for a commercial press should be supplied in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black), not RGB. Convert your images and colour swatches before you export, because the conversion will happen at some point — and it is far better that you control it than that it happens automatically without your knowledge.

Be aware that some bright RGB colours — electric blues, neon greens, vivid oranges — simply cannot be reproduced in CMYK. They will shift. If a particular brand colour matters enormously, ask your printer about a spot colour, mixed as a Pantone reference and printed as a separate ink. It costs more, but for a logo or a signature brand shade it is often worth it.

For large solid black areas, use a rich black (a mix of all four inks, such as 40/30/30/100) rather than 100% black, which can look washed out and flat. Reserve plain 100K black for small text, where misregistration on press can make mixed blacks look blurry.

Resolution: Why 300dpi Is Not a Suggestion

Print needs more detail than screens. The industry standard for photographic images is 300 dots per inch at the final printed size. A 72dpi web image dragged into a layout will look sharp on your laptop and noticeably soft, blocky or pixelated on paper.

Two things to watch:

• Check resolution at 100% size. Placing a small, high-resolution image and then scaling it up to fill a page reduces its effective resolution. A 300dpi image used at double size becomes 150dpi.
• Never upscale. Increasing the dpi setting in an image editor does not add detail; it just invents pixels. If an image is too low resolution, source a better one.

Logos, icons, charts and illustrations should be supplied as vector files — AI, EPS, SVG or PDF — which scale to any size without losing sharpness. Only photographs and textured artwork need to be raster images.

Fonts, Images and File Format

Missing fonts are one of the most common causes of delays. If your printer does not have the font you used, your carefully kerned headline will reflow in something entirely different. You have two options: embed the fonts when you export, or convert your text to outlines. Outlining is safest but makes the text uneditable, so keep an original working file as well.

Check that your images are embedded in the file rather than linked to a folder your printer cannot see. If you are sending a native InDesign or Affinity file, use the package function so fonts, images and colours travel together.

The safest export format is a press-ready PDF — PDF/X-1a or PDF/X-4 are widely accepted — with crop marks and bleed included. Many printers prefer a high-resolution PDF over a native file, as it is less likely to shift between machines.

Finally, always request a proof before the full run. A digital proof lets you check layout, spelling and pagination cheaply; a hard-copy proof is better for judging colour, especially on the exact stock you have chosen. Sign it off, note the date, and keep a copy. It protects both you and your printer if anything is queried later. Give yourself a few extra working days for this step — it is the cheapest insurance in printing.