Design Guide
Our design guideline will help you set up a print ready artwork to ensure there are no delays when processing your order.
File Formats
We accept the following files:
- PDF (recommended)
- jpg
- png
It is good practice to save all your files to PDF as it can handle multiple pages in 1 file while containing fonts our machines may not have. If you are designing for a brochure or anything with more than 2 pages, 1 PDF will be required containing all your pages. Please be aware that PDF artwork created using any of the Microsoft Office suite of programs are not designed for commercial printing for quality artwork such as a poster and are only good for text heavy documents like a report.
Paper Size
All artwork should be designed to the exact size you require your prints. If you are creating your artwork for a brochure, please do not send us spreads as this may cause complications, the best practice is to create all your artwork on separate pages and organised in the correct order, if you are using indesign you will be required to save your spread pages as single pages.
Bleed & Crop Marks
If your artwork has any colours or images which goes right to the edge of the paper, we will need 3 mm bleed. Artwork with no bleed will result to prints with white borders and the solution is to add 3mm bleed to all 4 side resulting to an artwork which is 6mm larger. By adding the 3mm bleed, this allows us to compensate for any incorrect cut when doing the initial cuts, so the first 2 cuts may be slightly in or out from the trim line and when the 2 final cuts are done, your extra 3mm bleed is there on the other end which hasn’t been cut to allow for a final cut which is to your exact dimension.
Instructions
1 
Safe Area
The safe area is the white rectangle with the red dash lines on the image to the left. All Important information such as images and text should remain inside this safe area. Images and text should be high resolution (300dpi) or Vectorised for a good quality print.
Trim Line
Your prints will be trimmed on the black dashed lines. Initial cuts may be slightly incorrect and can be trimmed in the grey trim area or bleed area, do not put any text within these areas.
Bleed Area
All images or block colours which you would like on the trim line should extend to the end of the 3mm bleed area. The bleed area allows us to compensate for the initial incorrect trimming by cutting the final cuts to the exact dimension without having a white border on the other side.
2
Creating Artwork
When designing your artwork based on safe area, trim line and bleed area, your artwork should look similar to the second image when overlaid with a template. As you can see on the second image, all text and images are within the safe area and the red shape on the top left extends right to the end of the bleed area, this is how artwork should be designed if you require a borderless print.
The following image is how your print ready artwork should look like when saved. Print ready artwork is fine without crop marks but is preferred.
3 
Print Ready Artwork With Crop Marks
The third image is a print ready artwork saved with crop marks. If you are designing your artwork in adobe illustrator or indesign, there should be a setting called bleed setting, enter 3mm and a red line should appear outside of your artwork canvas, the edge of the canvas will be the trim line and the red line is where all your artwork with bleed should extend to.
When saving your file to pdf, ensure the “Adobe PDF Preset ” option is set to the high quality print, and on the left hand side select the tab named “Marks and Bleeds”, in this section there should be 2 options which need to be ticked, these are “Trim Marks” and “Use Document Bleed Settings”.
4
Print Ready Artwork Without Crop Marks
The fourth image is the print ready artwork without crop marks, but it does have bleed so if your artwork is a standard business card size (85 x 55mm) the saved print ready artwork will be 91 x 61mm. Once we receive your artwork, we will then add crop marks to your full bleed artwork if it doesn’t have crop marks.
If you are designing your artwork in Adobe Photoshop, we recommend to not add crop marks as there is a possibility of error when you add the crop marks manually, but if you insist on adding crop marks, please make sure the crop marks do not intersect each other or are too close together as it will defeat the purpose of bleed and have a possibility of showing up on the edge of your prints when trimmed. Crop marks should look similar to the 3rd image or to be safe it can be outside of the artwork with bleed.
5 
Final Output – Trimmed Artwork
The fifth image demonstrates what your print will roughly look like when printed and trimmed to the final size so it will look similar to the fourth image but without the bleed. As an important reminder explained on the first image, the final output will not always be perfectly trimmed in the same place as there will be a slight room of error when doing the initial cuts, hence the need for bleed, but the final cut size will always remain the same so the centred information could be slightly offset from the middle.
