If you are supplying artwork such as logos for printing on cards, please read this before sending it to us.
- The design needs to be reasonable-sized otherwise the quality will suffer when it’s scaled up. We print at 600 pixels to the inch, and the green dog logo on the demonstration card is 1024 pixels square. You can get away with less, but something whose resolution is a hundred pixels or so isn’t going to work well.
The file size is a good indication. Your’re looking for something which is at least a few hundred KB in size. - Like most printing, we print in CMYK because it starts with a white background and we’re subtracting colours. We can print from files in RGB whcih you use on websites where the screen is black and the process is adding colours, but the results won’t be as good. Having said that, most people send us RGB images and they’re happy with the quality.
- If you have a choice, or you’re desiging something special, this type of dye transfer printing doesn’t work exactly like ink printing
- Graduated colours and shades never look as good as solid colours
- We can print to the edge of the card but, unlike paper, the card has significant thickness and the white edge of the card is seen unless you are viewing it straight on – which can be annoying – so it’s best not to print to the edge.
- The cards are 54mm x 85.5mm. It doesn’t need any bleed if you do decide to print to the edge, but it won’t hurt, and it doesn’t need any registration or lineup marks.
- We can print from SVG files, and of course they resize perfectly.
- We can print block colours for things like gold stars but the final print pass usually prints CMYK plus the protective overlay, so we would print the block colours first.
- Signature strips are printed like a block colour but on top of the final overlay – otherwise you can’t write on them
If you don’t have a graphic designer we can usually make a good job from a simple logo file provided it’s big enough to not go all pixelated when we scale it to the required size. This is what most people do, and they are happy with the results.