What goes in a print-ready artwork file

What print-ready actually means

Print-ready describes a file that is completely finished and set up so it can go straight into production without changes. It is not the same as a file that simply looks good on your screen. A design can look crisp in an email or on a website and still fail once it is printed, because print follows physical rules that a screen does not. When a file is print-ready, every one of those rules has already been dealt with: the size is correct, the colours are built for ink, the images are sharp at full size, the text is locked in place, and the whole thing is saved in a format the production process can read.

This matters because once a job is running there is usually no going back. Paper and set-up have been committed, so a mistake in the file becomes a mistake in the box that lands on your counter. That is why we treat the file as the most important part of any print job, whether you have designed it yourself or asked us to create it from scratch.

The shape of the page: size, bleed and safe area

Three things decide whether a design survives being cut to size. Getting them right is what separates a clean, edge-to-edge finish from a job with a thin white line down one side.

Bleed

When colour or an image runs all the way to the edge of a design, it has to be extended past the finished edge of the page. That overspill is called bleed. Printing is done on larger sheets that are then trimmed to size, and no trim is perfectly precise, so the extra margin means a tiny shift in the cut still leaves ink right to the edge instead of a bare white strip. Bleed is commonly around 3mm on each side, though the right amount depends on the piece.

Trim and crop marks

The trim line is where the page will actually be cut. Crop marks are the small lines placed just outside the page that show the cutter exactly where to slice. A press-ready PDF includes these automatically when the file has been set up correctly, so you do not have to add them by hand.

The safe margin

Bleed protects the outer edge; a safe margin protects the inside. Keep anything you cannot afford to lose, logos, headlines, phone numbers and addresses, a few millimetres in from the trim, roughly 3 to 5mm. If important text sits right on the edge and the cut shifts, you can lose the top of a letter or the end of a number.

Page size and folds

The document must be built at the true finished size: an A5 flyer at A5, an A4 menu at A4, a business card at card size, never scaled up from something smaller. Folded items such as leaflets and menus need to be set up with the folds in the right places, which is easy to get wrong when you are working one page at a time.

Colour built for ink, not for screens

Screens create colour with light, mixing red, green and blue, and they can glow. Print creates colour by laying down ink, usually four process colours: cyan, magenta, yellow and black, known together as CMYK. The two do not overlap perfectly. Some of the brightest, most saturated colours on a screen cannot be mixed from ink at all, so a vivid on-screen blue or orange may print a little softer or deeper. This is normal, not a fault. A print-ready file has its colours set in CMYK so there are no surprises later.

For a brand colour that must be exact every time, a spot colour, often quoted as a Pantone number, can be specified so the same ink is used rather than a four-colour mix. This matters most for logos and corporate colours that appear across many printed items. There is detail in the blacks too: a large solid black looks richer when built from a mix of inks, while small text should stay as plain black so it prints crisp. A well-prepared file handles these choices for you.

Consistent colour is also what makes a brand feel professional. When your menu, your flyer and your shop sign all use the same defined colours, they read as one business rather than three separate efforts, and that consistency is far easier to hold when the colour is specified properly in the file.

Resolution and the images you supply

A photo that looks perfect on a website can look blocky in print, because screens and paper measure detail in different ways. Print generally wants images at about 300 dots per inch at the final printed size. Those last four words matter: a small image stretched to fill a poster gains no detail, it simply spreads the pixels it already has, and the result looks soft. As a rule, pictures pulled straight from a website or social media are too low in resolution for anything but the smallest use.

Logos, icons and line artwork are best supplied as vector files, formats such as EPS, AI or a vector PDF. Vector artwork is drawn with maths rather than pixels, so it stays razor sharp at any size, from a business card to a shop sign. A logo saved only as a small web image will not enlarge cleanly. Large-format work such as banners and exhibition graphics is more forgiving, because it is viewed from a distance, but the safest approach is always to start with the largest, cleanest original you have.

Fonts, text and the details that catch people out

A design file can point to a font that lives on your own computer. If it is then opened somewhere without that font installed, the text can reflow or swap to a different typeface, which changes the whole layout. A print-ready file avoids this by embedding the fonts inside the file or by converting the text to outlines, which turns the letters into fixed shapes. Either way, the words stay exactly where you placed them.

Once text has been outlined it can no longer be edited as type, so the wording has to be right beforehand. This is the moment to check phone numbers, opening hours, prices, web addresses and the spelling of names, because the file is about to become fixed. We always send a proof to approve before anything goes ahead, and that approval is your chance to catch anything. Very thin lines and very small light-on-dark text can also fill in or break up in print, so a careful file keeps line weights and type sizes sensible.

File formats that work, and ones that cause trouble

The most reliable format for print is a press-ready PDF, specifically one saved to a recognised print standard such as PDF/X-1a or PDF/X-4. A PDF made this way carries the correct page size, the bleed, the embedded fonts and CMYK colour in a single self-contained file that behaves the same wherever it is opened. It is the format we prefer to work with and the one production runs on.

Most of the problems we see come from everyday office and home-design tools. Microsoft Word, Publisher and PowerPoint are built for screens and office printers, not commercial production: they treat colour, bleed and fonts loosely, and a document can look different on another computer. A flat JPEG or PNG, especially one sized for a website, usually lacks both the resolution and the bleed a print run needs, and a screenshot is lower resolution still.

If you have designed something in Canva or a similar online tool, it can still work well. The trick is to export it as a print PDF with bleed and crop marks switched on, rather than downloading a standard image or a screen PDF. If you are unsure, send the file over and we will tell you whether it is ready or exactly what it needs.

How Cornwall Design & Print handles it for you

Most business owners have no wish to learn any of this, and they should not have to. When you work with the studio you can hand over as much or as little as you like. If you already have artwork, we check it against every point above, a step known as preflighting, and tell you plainly whether it is ready or what needs fixing. If you would rather begin with an idea, a rough sketch or an old file, we design the piece from scratch and build the print-ready file for you.

From there we manage the print itself, so you are not left chasing specifications or second-guessing bleed and colour, and the finished job is delivered to your door. For a Truro cafe that might mean a menu that reads cleanly and prints right to the edge. For a holiday let it could be a welcome pack and signage that match the website. For a market trader or a gallery it might be banners, flyers and invitations that all sit together as one brand. Whatever the item, the promise is the same: you approve a proof, and what arrives matches it.

A quick check before you approve

If you are preparing a file yourself, or checking one a designer has sent you, this short list catches the great majority of print problems before they reach production.

• The page is the correct finished size, with bleed added wherever colour or images run to the edge.
• Important text and logos sit a few millimetres inside the trim, never right on it.
• Colours are set for CMYK print, and any exact brand colour is specified separately.
• Photos are sharp at their final printed size, and logos are supplied as vector artwork where possible.
• Fonts are embedded or outlined, and every word has been proofread.
• The file is a press-ready PDF, not a Word, Publisher, PowerPoint or web image file.