Preparing Artwork for Print: Bleed, Colour, Resolution, and the Checks That Prevent Reprints

Almost every reprint traces back to one of five things: missing bleed, wrong colour space, low-resolution images, unoutlined fonts, or text too close to the trim. None of them are difficult to avoid. All of them are invisible on screen.

This is the checklist, with the reasoning behind each item. For teams coordinating overlapping creative work, a useful operational reference is this breakdown, which covers time allocation and hand-offs.

Bleed and safe area

Printing does not happen at final size. Sheets are printed larger and trimmed down, and trimming has a tolerance of roughly a millimetre either way.

Bleed is artwork extended beyond the trim line so that trimming variance cuts into artwork rather than past it. Without bleed, a card with a coloured background comes back with thin white slivers along one or two edges.

Standard is 3 mm on every side. Large-format work often needs more — confirm with your printer. Relevant production standards can be explored in the ISO standards catalogue.

Safe area is the inverse: keep all text and critical elements at least 3–5 mm inside the trim line. Trimming variance that eats into a background is invisible; the same variance clipping a phone number is not.

Set up three guides on every document: bleed, trim, and safe area. If your layout requires text closer to the edge than the safe area allows, the layout needs changing, not the safe area.

Colour: CMYK, not RGB

Screens emit light and mix red, green, and blue. Presses lay down ink and mix cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The two produce overlapping but different sets of colours, and CMYK is the smaller set.

Convert to CMYK yourself, deliberately. If you send RGB, the printer's software converts automatically, and automatic conversion is where a saturated brand blue arrives as something duller and slightly purple. Converting yourself means you see the shift and can compensate.

Colours that will not survive: vivid greens, electric blues, neon oranges, and anything that looks like it is glowing. If your brand palette includes one of these and print matters, you need either a Pantone spot colour or a revised palette. Relevant production standards can be explored in the ISO standards catalogue.

Use Pantone for brand colours anywhere consistency matters across print runs and vendors. A Pantone reference is the only way two different printers produce the same colour.

Ask your printer for their profile. Different presses and stocks need different ICC profiles. A coated stock and an uncoated stock reproduce the same CMYK values noticeably differently.

Rich black versus flat black

100% K on its own prints as a slightly washed charcoal across large areas. It looks black on screen and grey on paper.

Rich black adds the other inks underneath — a common recipe is C60 M40 Y40 K100, though your printer may specify their own. Use it for large solid black areas.

Flat 100% K is correct for small text. Rich black on small type requires four inks to register perfectly; any slight misregistration produces coloured fringing on the letterforms.

So: rich black for backgrounds and large shapes, 100% K for body copy. Getting this backwards is one of the most common print errors.

Resolution

300 dpi at final print size is the working standard for photographs and raster artwork.

The phrase "at final print size" carries the weight. A 300 dpi image scaled up 200% in your layout is effectively 150 dpi. Check effective resolution in your layout software, not the image's stated dpi.

Large format is different. Billboards and banners are viewed from distance and print at much lower resolution — often 72–150 dpi at final size. Ask your printer rather than assuming.

Vector artwork has no resolution. Logos, icons, and type should be vector wherever possible, which is why a proper logo file package matters. See our guide to logo file formats.

Fonts

Convert type to outlines before sending, or embed fonts fully in the PDF.

A live-text file sent to a printer whose system lacks your font will substitute something else, and the substitution reflows the text — line breaks move, spacing changes, and a carefully set layout comes back subtly wrong.

Keep a live-text version for yourself. Outlined type cannot be edited.

Overprint and knockout

Knockout removes the artwork underneath an element, so only the top element's ink is laid down. This is the default and usually correct.

Overprint prints one ink on top of another. Useful deliberately; damaging accidentally. White objects set to overprint disappear entirely on press — the classic version of this error is white text over a coloured background vanishing from the printed piece.

Check overprint settings in your pre-flight and turn on overprint preview before approving anything.

Special finishes

Spot UV, foil, embossing, die-cuts, and edge painting each need a separate artwork layer specifying where the effect goes, usually as 100% of a named spot colour.

Your printer will tell you their convention. Ask before building the file — retro-fitting a spot UV layer is more work than including it from the start.

The file to send

Press-ready PDF, exported with:

PDF/X-4 or PDF/X-1a, whichever your printer specifies
Bleed included, crop marks on
Fonts outlined or fully embedded
Images at effective 300 dpi
CMYK colour, correct ICC profile
Spot colours named consistently
Layers flattened unless the printer asks otherwise

Send one file per piece. Multi-page documents as single PDFs with pages in reading order, not as separate files named "page1final_v3_USE THIS".

Pre-flight checklist

[ ] 3 mm bleed on all sides
[ ] All text inside the safe area
[ ] CMYK, converted deliberately, with printer's profile
[ ] Pantone references specified for brand colours
[ ] Rich black for large areas, 100% K for small text
[ ] Effective resolution 300 dpi at final size
[ ] Fonts outlined or embedded
[ ] Overprint preview checked, no white overprint
[ ] Special finish layers separated and named
[ ] Spelling proofed by someone who did not write it
[ ] Phone numbers and URLs actually tested

That last line is not a joke. Printed material carrying a dead URL or a mistyped digit is the most expensive and most preventable error in the list, and it survives every technical check because technically the file is perfect.

Always request a proof

For anything above a small run, request a physical proof on the actual stock. Screen colour, soft proofs, and printed colour differ, and no simulation substitutes for holding the piece.

A digital proof confirms content and layout. A press proof or wet proof confirms colour on the real stock and press. The second costs more and is worth it whenever exact colour matters — packaging, brand-critical material, or anything where a reprint would be expensive.

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