If you’re considering printing brochures or postcards that have colour touching the edges of the finished piece then your printer will need a file that has bleeds and crops. Most layout programs today will automatically produce crop marks and allow you to specify your bleed distance.
If you don’t have a vector based version of you logo you should!! A logo that’s in vector format can be scaled to any size and retain its crisp, clean quality which is important when you’re printing vinyl banners or trade show displays. Most logos that are supplied to us are in jpeg or gif format which is bitmap or raster based and is dependent on the resolution of the image. I’ll quickly outline the difference between vector and raster based files.
Banding issues in gradients can be a problem in offset print and large format printing. We usually run into this issue when we’re printing large format for banner stands or offset printing for full colour brochures . The issue tends to be more prevalent when gradients are created in Illustrator for output to large format printers. Certain colour schemes also can be more prone to banding such as dark blue to light blue. If you’re creating gradients in Illustrator, Photoshop or Indesign you’ll need to make sure there are no banding issues before your artwork is output to final print.
One of the common issues that we encounter when producing vinyl banners or trade show graphics is low resolution or poor quality images. People will often take an image that is 3″ x 5″ and increase it to 3′ x 5′ and wonder why it looks really bad!!