Common mistakes in the design of printed products
Printing is a powerful advertising tool, but only if it is done with high quality. Regardless of whether you need small business cards or wide banners, preparation of printed products should be organized competently and beautifully. Mistakes can negatively affect not only the perception of products, but also directly on your income.
We invite you to study the main mistakes that designers can make when creating layouts for printing. In this case, you will be able to control the process yourself and correct the discrepancies in time, if suddenly the experts allow them.
TOP-5 mistakes of designers in printing
The quality of the finished product should not suffer! Therefore, it is so important to remove everything that does not suit you, even before the print run is sent to print. Such moments should not be allowed in the design.
No allowances
If significant design details are located very close to the edge of the sheet, there is a high probability that they will simply be cut off during printing and further processing. Even the most modern and reliable equipment cannot guarantee the absence of errors.
Allowances conditionally outline a safe zone, beyond which neither text nor images should go. Everything that is within their borders will definitely not be cut by printing or cutting equipment. For products of complex shape, you need to leave allowances of 3 mm, and for any rectangular ones – 2 mm.
Low-res bitmaps
Even if in the electronic version the image looks clear, it is not at all a fact that it will remain so when printed. The result depends on the original quality. It should be at least 200 dpi, and preferably 300 dpi, especially when it comes to detailed pictures, faces, images with many objects.
How do I define a bitmap? The easiest way is by its extension: .gif, .tiff, .jpeg or .png – bitmap image markers. These are either individual elements, or the entire print design can be rasterized.
Font Overload
In pursuit of beauty and originality, you need to know when to stop. If the layout uses more than two main fonts, it looks clumsy, fussy, and cumbersome. The text of advertising printing should look like a single whole, you should not confuse the reader with different-sized fonts, even if they look beautiful separately.
Simple and straightforward design always takes precedence over pretentious. Want to stand out from the competition? It is better to come up with an original idea or a unique proposal than to play on the type design.
No overprint
Overprint is an option that allows you to print text over the background. When you turn it off, what you write looks blurry, indistinct and inconvenient to read. The reader is more likely to not want to strain his eyes to study the sentence. This applies not only to text, but also small images, details, thin lines in drawings, tables.
To make layout printing not a problem, you must enable overprint when using black text up to 14 point size or black lines up to 2 mm thick.
Using process printing
Concerns small details, lines, small fonts, just like the previous point. The triadic method is printing with three primary colors – cyan, yellow, magenta. Mixing these paints can result in black color, which in some cases can have completely unpredictable “side effects”.
For example, a colored iris, similar to the 3D effect of a stereoscope, may suddenly appear around a compound black text. In some cases it looks beautiful, but it is far from always appropriate in advertising printing. The reader may feel unaccustomed to thinking that his eyes are blurry.
Now you know what layout errors should never be ignored. Contact Experimental First to avoid all of the above and many other defects. Our experts will make sure that you get the perfect result!
Common mistakes in the design of printed products
Printing is a powerful advertising tool, but only if it is done with high quality. Regardless of whether you need small business cards or wide banners, preparation of printed products should be organized competently and beautifully. Mistakes can negatively affect not only the perception of products, but also directly on your income.
We invite you to study the main mistakes that designers can make when creating layouts for printing. In this case, you will be able to control the process yourself and correct the discrepancies in time, if suddenly the experts allow them.
TOP-5 mistakes of designers in printing
The quality of the finished product should not suffer! Therefore, it is so important to remove everything that does not suit you, even before the print run is sent to print. Such moments should not be allowed in the design.
No allowances
If significant design details are located very close to the edge of the sheet, there is a high probability that they will simply be cut off during printing and further processing. Even the most modern and reliable equipment cannot guarantee the absence of errors.
Allowances conditionally outline a safe zone, beyond which neither text nor images should go. Everything that is within their borders will definitely not be cut by printing or cutting equipment. For products of complex shape, you need to leave allowances of 3 mm, and for any rectangular ones – 2 mm.
Low-res bitmaps
Even if in the electronic version the image looks clear, it is not at all a fact that it will remain so when printed. The result depends on the original quality. It should be at least 200 dpi, and preferably 300 dpi, especially when it comes to detailed pictures, faces, images with many objects.
How do I define a bitmap? The easiest way is by its extension: .gif, .tiff, .jpeg or .png – bitmap image markers. These are either individual elements, or the entire print design can be rasterized.
Font Overload
In pursuit of beauty and originality, you need to know when to stop. If the layout uses more than two main fonts, it looks clumsy, fussy, and cumbersome. The text of advertising printing should look like a single whole, you should not confuse the reader with different-sized fonts, even if they look beautiful separately.
Simple and straightforward design always takes precedence over pretentious. Want to stand out from the competition? It is better to come up with an original idea or a unique proposal than to play on the type design.
No overprint
Overprint is an option that allows you to print text over the background. When you turn it off, what you write looks blurry, indistinct and inconvenient to read. The reader is more likely to not want to strain his eyes to study the sentence. This applies not only to text, but also small images, details, thin lines in drawings, tables.
To make layout printing not a problem, you must enable overprint when using black text up to 14 point size or black lines up to 2 mm thick.
Using process printing
Concerns small details, lines, small fonts, just like the previous point. The triadic method is printing with three primary colors – cyan, yellow, magenta. Mixing these paints can result in black color, which in some cases can have completely unpredictable “side effects”.
For example, a colored iris, similar to the 3D effect of a stereoscope, may suddenly appear around a compound black text. In some cases it looks beautiful, but it is far from always appropriate in advertising printing. The reader may feel unaccustomed to thinking that his eyes are blurry.
Now you know what layout errors should never be ignored. Contact Experimental First to avoid all of the above and many other defects. Our experts will make sure that you get the perfect result!