It’s Time You Learn To Avoid These Common Printing Mistakes!

Businesses and home offices consider printers as a necessity. You get to enjoy the convenience, secure delivery, ease of reading and you can share the printer on a network. That said, there are many printing mistakes that people make that need to be avoided. Even the seasoned designers still make mistakes. Below are some of the printing mistakes that you need to avoid at all costs:

Inadequate bleed on artwork

You need to put in place a decent bleed, otherwise you are asking for trouble. To be on the safe side, it is important to have 3mm of bleed for your print jobs such as the letterheads, business cards and posters among other hand-held print jobs. And large format prints will always require more bleed. In this case, it is prudent to ‘ask’ your printer if this is possible.

Use of small text on rich black background

Sometimes you may want to have small text that is knocked out of a black background. So, always make sure that this does not include large amounts of magenta, cyan and yellow because if you do, then your text will print blurred. This comes as a result of slight misalignment of the printing plates and ink bleed.

Although the digital print comes in handy, this is still a problem and the main cause of several printing mistakes. It is recommended that you use white text on your background, especially if it has black in it. And there should be no other color there. And if you want a richer black background, you can use small amounts of colored ink so as to get more suitable results. This principle also holds true for those colors on textures too.  

Having images that are not converted to CMYK

Most inexperienced designers don’t know the difference between CMYK and RGB. If you don’t know don’t send anything to the printer; make sure you learn the basic because the error you are about to make is an expensive one. Don’t forget to convert your images from RGB to CMYK. It is true that modern PDF can do this automatically upon saving, but the conversion can throw your color all over the place. You want to make sure that you convert profiles if you are using digital photos or after working in RGB.

Spelling mistakes

This is said to be the mother of all printing mistakes. Of course human is to error, but you want to check the spelling yourself before printing. Spelling mistakes that are noticed only after a design has been printed are an obvious no-no. You don’t have to be the writer of the original copy; always go through your text and check for errors. And hitting on the F7 in your keyboard may not help much. The spell checker may ignore some errors and may not pick up on ‘the’ instead of ‘then,’ for example.

Designing without quiet borders

This is somewhat a buffer area where no defined elements or text should be located. Your quiet border should be at least 5mm from the edge of your document. If you don’t observe a quiet border, your text could be chopped off. And the larger your print is the wider should be a quiet border.

Having fonts that are not converted to the outlines in InDesign or Adobe illustrator

If for instance you are designing a CD sleeve, chances are high, you will need Adobe Illustrator to compile raster images and vector artwork. You need to convert any text used in your design to outlines, way before exporting as a PDF. Yes, the modern PDF file standards can embed fonts, but you want to do this so as to remove any future problems. And it is prudent to create a backup file copy before converting to outlines.

Too low image resolution

You should note that image resolution for print has to be between three hundred pixels per inch and four hundred pixels per inch. This will depend on the print service in use. Setting the pixel per inch too high or setting the resolution too low is one of the biggest mistakes people make. You may want to consult with the professionals on what to do with the images from the web if you are finding problems printing.

Using raster text instead of vectors

It is a must to use vector typography especially for those hand-held print works such as booklets and CDs. If you ignore this, then your text won’t look sharp. Vectors graphics look sharp simply because they are made from a mathematical formulae. The rasters are made from pixels, and this is also what digital images are made of. Always make sure that you print proofs before sending your files to print.

At Toronto Division Copiers, we offer the very best quality Kyocera printers within the Great Toronto Area. If you have any questions about these printers, feel free to contact us. We will be more than happy to serve you.