Introduction to Prepress
What a designer should know to make mockups sharp and ready when interacting with printing house.
When designing for an any kind of print, you definitely may face a lot of pitfalls. Usually, designers discuss whether this is their responsibility to make prepress preparations or typography houses’ ones. I tend to lean towards the side of taking partial responsibility on it and do some operations on your files that would not take a lot of time but may help typographies to put your mockups into progress faster and make the printing process way quicker. In case to avoid arbitrary actions and provide a high-quality product, designer has to know these basic rules about how to get mockups ready-to-print.
1. Clarify technical requirements in advance
When you receive a task for mockup for printing, the best practice is to contact the specified typography house and ask for their particular technical requirements. Because these guidelines may vary from one typography to another, collaboration is a key to successful and productive work. It is moreover easier to make settings when you know the guides than if you don’t. It goes about: color profile, format and size of a document, bleed size and so on.
Is it digital printing or offset? CMYK or Pantone? Euro or US paper format? Better speak up all the info in advance.
2. Save in appropriate formats
Always save your files in those formats that could be opened by any designer’s software. Cross-platform formats work the best. I prefer .eps and .pdf for digital print and .tif for large format printing. There are some initial settings for Adobe Illustrator and InDesign you must check while saving for print. Make sure you chose ‘Print Quality’ in the dropdown menu. And obviously all the text is outlined.
3. Be careful with any incoming data or pitfalls.
By pitfalls hereby I mean those specific things that may not seem important at the first glance but able to ruin your design when not treated seriously.
They are:
• paper type
• color profile
• type of fabric
• printing technology
• size of source items.
As it has been already mentioned previously, all the incoming information must be clarified as much as possible. Even the CMYK color profile (Coated or Uncoated, Fogra 39 or Fogra 27) makes sense. Usually, if the requirements are unknown I set up my settings for printing like that:
Some kinds of natural fabric absorb the paint intensively, so that the output image will not look dim it is recommended to add an extra primer layer of white base.
Believe it or not, certain printing technologies require images in sRGB color scheme (like DTG printing).
4. Set up the convenient workspace
It really makes the work easier when keeping your workspace clean and handy. Go to settings, arrange layout as you like it and don’t forget to keep layer panel tidy. Check swatches settings and paragraph styles. Good preparation makes good start.
There are a bunch of simple, but not only rules to make your designs clean and ready-to-print for most of typography houses.
