What Print-Ready Actually Means (And Why a Phone JPEG Will Not Cut It)
You've got a logo, a photo, maybe a flyer someone knocked up in Word. You send it to a printer, and back comes the dreaded reply: "This isn't print-ready — can you send proper artwork?" Frustrating, especially when the file looked fine on your screen.
"Print-ready" isn't a vague quality bar. It's a specific set of technical conditions a file has to meet before a printer can produce it properly. Here's what they actually are, without the jargon.
Resolution: enough detail to print sharply
Screens are forgiving — an image that looks crisp on your phone can be far too low-resolution for print. Print needs roughly 300 DPI (dots per inch) at the final printed size. A photo pulled off a website or a social post is usually around 72 DPI, which prints blurry and pixelated.
This is why "I'll just screenshot the logo" rarely works — a screenshot is screen-resolution, and blowing it up to print size makes it fuzzy. Print-ready artwork is built at the right resolution from the start.
Colour: built in CMYK, not screen colour
Printers work in CMYK ink, not the RGB colour your screen uses. A file in the wrong colour mode can shift colour unpredictably when it's printed. Print-ready files are set up in CMYK so the colours you approve are the colours you get. (We go into this properly in CMYK vs RGB.)
Bleed: a margin so the trim looks clean
If your design has colour or images running to the edge of the page, the file needs bleed — a few extra millimetres of the design extending past where the paper gets cut. Printers cut through stacks of paper and the blade can move very slightly, so without bleed you risk a thin white sliver along the edge. Print-ready files include the bleed so the trim is clean every time.
Fonts and layout: locked so nothing shifts
Send an editable file and the fonts can substitute, text can reflow, and the layout you approved can fall apart on someone else's computer. Print-ready files have fonts embedded or outlined and the layout fixed — usually supplied as a press-ready PDF — so what you approved is exactly what prints.
The right file format
A flattened press-ready PDF is the standard for most print jobs — it locks in resolution, colour, bleed and fonts in one file any printer can use. A Word document, a PowerPoint slide, or a low-res JPEG off your phone are none of those things, which is why printers push back on them.
So why does "just send the JPEG" go wrong?
Because a casual file usually fails several of these at once: it's screen-resolution, in RGB, with no bleed, and in a format that isn't built for press. It looks fine on a screen — screens hide all four problems — and only falls apart at the printer.
The short version
Print-ready means: high enough resolution (300 DPI), CMYK colour, bleed where needed, fonts locked in, supplied as a press-ready PDF. Hit all of those and any printer can run your job with no surprises. Miss them and you get blur, colour shifts, white edges, or a flat-out rejection.
The good news is you don't have to learn any of this. When we design your artwork, every file we supply meets all of it — print-ready, for any printer, so you stay in control of where you print. You upload your content and brief; we handle the technical side.
See how it works → · Read our artwork guidelines → · Browse what we design →