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Print Glossary

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Tips

Tips

Not everyone is experienced in print and design, so this page has been written to give you some tips on how to prepare your artwork in the best format and provide you with a clearer understanding of some of the more commonly used terms within our industry. See also our Glossary page, which contains a lot of information about print.

Bleed - What is it?

You may have seen the term 'bleed' used in a mechanical specification for artwork. Bleed means the area that overlaps the border of your document. If any element on your layout makes contact with the document border (i.e. the edge that will be trimmed) you will have to use bleed. The trick is to make the objects in your artwork extend over the border where the document will be cropped. We recommend a 3mm bleed all around your job.

The difference between CMYK and RGB

Confusion often arises between different types of colour separation. As a general rule, CMYK is used for printing and RBG is used to view images on a screen. CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (or Black) and is commonly referred to as a 4-colour process. Most colours can be pretty accurately reproduced using 4-colour process but there are exceptions. If you want to match a colour very accurately you might want to use 5-colour print (where the 4-colour process is enhanced by the addition of a pantone colour to give an almost exact match). Another exception is metallic colours and certain blues (Reflex blue for example), which do not reproduce well using CMYK. RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue and is a format used in photography. You will need to convert photographs from the RGB to the CMYK format before they are printed. Most photo editing packages will allow you to do this before you place them into your artwork, but if you have any problems, Palladian’s design studio will be pleased to help.

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