Give your business the professional edge!

Anyone who types on a regular basis will understand how easy it is to make a typing error. This happens frequently with proofing. In fact with printing, one thing occurs almost as much as typing errors, and that’s customers not finding them. This is the reason why we insist you see a proof before we proceed with printing. Believe it or not, I once had a client who missed the incorrect spelling of their name on a business card and I’ve lost track of how many people have missed an incorrect phone number. The best advice I can give is to take your time and read everything thoroughly. We have a blog post dedicated to this subject. Asking a friend to read the proof will also minimise the chance of errors slipping through. 

A job printed lithographically is produced on a printing press, while digital printing is printed on a copier or printer connected directly to a computer. When someone says that a job will be printed digitally, it’s just a fancy term for copying. Digital doesn’t mean the quality is better, in fact it’s usually worse. Most copiers are capable of producing excellent quality, but I’m yet to find a copier that matches the quality of a printing press (except the HP Indigo which costs half a million dollars). Like most printing companies, we have a colour copier for short runs, but I always like to show our customers the difference in quality and the best option for their printing job. More information can be found on our blog about this subject.

No problem, if you’re printing garage sale leaflets, party invitations or school assignments at home. However, if you want to design a leaflet or business card for a commercial printer to use, forget it. Canva, Publisher and Word don’t have the extra features that are required for professional print production, and contrary to how Microsoft and Canva promote them, were never designed for this purpose. Microsoft Publisher retails for roughly $180 while Canva is free, but they do have a paid version with extra features. In contrast, Adobe Creative Cloud starts at around $80 per month on their subscription. Furthermore, colours in Canva, Publisher and Word are always RGB (web colour), but printing companies use the CMYK format (four colour process). Templates are usually the wrong size (eg American letter instead of A4), with fold and trim lines in the wrong place, while images and fonts are usually low in resolution. These problems all result in a poor quality print job. Expecting Canva, Publisher or Word to do the same job as a professional graphic arts program is unrealistic. When we receive Publisher, Word or Canva files, it’s usually faster to re-design the job than to fix the file, and in most cases the problems can’t be fixed. To save a lot of time, money and frustration, my advice is to let a graphic artist do the artwork. After all, I’m not a mechanic so I don’t service my own car.

CMYK and RGB are terms used to describe the colour makeup of photos or images. RGB stands for Red, Green, Blue. CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key (black). Computer monitors emit colour as RGB, while printers use the CMYK process. CMYK is also referred to as four colour process which is the most commonly used printing method worldwide. When images are downloaded from the internet in RGB, the colour can look washed out and faded when printed. This problem can be partly resolved by converting all RGB images to CMYK before printing using a graphic arts program like Photoshop or Illustrator. Some colours in RGB are impossible to reproduce in CMYK. The computer just chooses the closest possible colour match and unfortunately this can be vastly different to the original colour. To make things more complicated, your computer monitor will most likely emit colour differently to mine, which makes it virtually impossible to match colour by eye. Colour conversion problems are very common in printing so when designing your own artwork, make sure you choose all your colours in CMYK format from the start.