Artwork guidelines

What does DPI mean — and why 300dpi minimum?

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DPI stands for "dots per inch" — how many ink dots a printer lays down across one inch of paper. 300dpi is the industry standard for crisp commercial print. Below that, fine detail and small text start looking soft or pixelated. Phone screens look great at 72–150dpi because they're glowing pixels you view at arm's length — print is reflective ink under direct light, and your eye is brutal on it.

What's CMYK — and what about RGB?

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RGB (red, green, blue) is the colour mode screens use — additive light. CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black/key) is what printers use — subtractive ink on paper. CMYK has a smaller colour range than RGB, so bright neons and deep glowing blues can look slightly duller in print. Upload your files in either — we convert to CMYK and proof for you before printing.

What's the difference between SVG, AI, EPS and PDF?

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They're all vector formats — files that scale to any size without losing quality, which is what you want for logos and type. SVG is the web standard, AI is Adobe Illustrator's native file, EPS is a legacy interchange format, and PDF is the universal one — most printers prefer print-ready PDFs. All four work for us.

Vector vs raster — what's the difference?

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Vector files (SVG, AI, EPS, PDF) are made of mathematical paths, so they stay sharp at any size — perfect for logos. Raster files (JPG, PNG, HEIC) are made of fixed pixels — fine for photos, but they go blurry when scaled up. As a rule: logos = vector, photos = raster.

What's bleed — and do I need to worry about it?

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Bleed is a small margin (usually 3mm) where the artwork extends past the final cut line. Printers can't slice paper to pixel-perfect accuracy, so bleed stops you ending up with thin white slivers along the edge. You don't need to worry about it — we set up bleed, safe margins and crop marks correctly on every job.

What's creep — and when does it matter?

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Creep happens on saddle-stitched booklets (folded and stapled). As pages fold inside each other, the inner pages stick out a tiny bit further than the outer ones, then get trimmed back — so content near the inside edge can drift inward. For 8-page menus and bigger, we shift content to compensate. You'll never see it; we just set it up.

What are print profiles (ICC profiles)?

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A print profile (or ICC profile) is a colour calibration file that tells the printer exactly how a specific paper and ink combination will reproduce colour. UK commercial print typically uses FOGRA39 for coated stock and FOGRA52 for uncoated. We embed the right profile in your final PDF so the colour matches the proof.

Why do file sizes matter (the "1MB+" rule)?

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A tiny file usually means a tiny image — and a tiny image at print size looks blurry. As a rule of thumb, photos and logos under 1MB are probably too small for print. A high-res photo from a recent phone is usually 2–5MB. A logo pulled from a website is often under 100KB — too small. Send the biggest version you have.

Why can't I just use the logo on my website?

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Web logos are usually compressed and low-resolution to load fast on browsers — they look great on screens but fall apart in print. If you only have the web version, send it and we'll let you know whether it'll work or whether we need to redraw it as a vector.

What's the safe area / margin?

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The safe area is a margin inside the page (usually 3–5mm) where important content like text and logos should sit. Anything outside that margin risks being trimmed off when the printer cuts the page. We keep critical content inside the safe area on every layout.