Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

While our prepress department is geared mainly toward preparing your artwork for successful printing, we do have designers on staff who can work with you to get artwork created for print. We can recreate a logo you have sketched on a napkin, update files you have not had printed in years, reformat your old catalog with a fresh new look or flow your text files into a completely new document. There is an hourly fee for this service.

Certainly! We are proud of the work we produce and are happy to send you samples and answer any questions you have.

Virtually every printing format allows for screens, gradients and halftones. There are times that products that are screen printed with these styles can cause banding in gradients and muddy looking halftones. During the ordering process, your Sales Representative and our Prepress department will review your artwork and recommend solutions for those intricate pieces you have designed.

Website images are usually 72 dpi (low resolution that speeds up loading of the webpage). For your printed images to be crisp and clear, we need artwork that is 300 dpi. Of course, you may choose to use a low-resolution image, but there is a possibility of it appearing jagged or fuzzy on the printed piece.

It is always best to start with a good quality image for the final printed images to be crisp and clear. EPS is a vector format designed for printing to PostScript printers and imagesetters. Vector-based graphics, EPS, are the best choice for high resolution printing of illustrations because it can be enlarged while maintaining sharpness and clarity and do not use halftone images. Raster based graphics, a TIFF, JPG or GIF, are best when some type of photographic image is part of the product. A TIFF is a versatile bitmap graphic format that is great for high-resolution printing to PostScript printers and imagesetters, however it cannot be enlarged without reducing its quality. JPG and GIF are also bitmap-based, but these formats save as lower resolution files. We prefer TIFF over JPG or GIF raster-based graphic files. Note: Vector and raster files can be combined in a design, provided all files used to create it are included with the file.

In four-color process printing, the four process colors CMYK (cyan – a bright blue, magenta – fuchsia, yellow and black) are blended, using tiny dots, to create other colors. Color photos, most gradients and blended colors are best printed in four-color process. What is not recommended for four-color process is fine lines and tiny type. This is because the blending of inks in the small dot patterns does not give a clean appearance. The only way this can work is if the fine lines and tiny type are printed in only one of the process colors, such as black.

Our most common issues are:

• Missing fonts
• Missing bleed
• Undefined colors
• Missing links
• Incorrect graphic formatting.

We strongly suggest you package all your file items (fonts, images, etc.) together in a .zip file when submitting your artwork. This is the best solution to minimize errors or missing items.