How To Set Up A Design File For Greetings Cards.
Setting up a design file for greeting cards for print involves several important steps to ensure your design looks great when it's printed. Here's a step-by-step guide:
Choose Your Card Size:
Decide on the size of your greeting card. There are multiple sizes to choose from, so ensure that you create your artwork for the correct card you are ordering. Make sure you set up your design document to the full size in millimetres. We advise that you download our artwork templates to help you get set up.
Choose Colour Mode:
Set your document to use the CMYK colour mode. This is essential for printing as it represents the four ink colours used in the printing process. If you design and supply your file in RGB, this could result in an undesired print finish.
Set Up Bleed:
Bleed is the area beyond the trim edge that ensures your design extends all the way to the edge of the printed card without any white borders. We require a 3mm bleed on all sides of the design. Set this in your document settings. More information - What is Bleed?
Determine Margins:
Leave a safe margin inside your document to ensure important elements like text and images aren't too close to the edge. A margin of at least 3 to 5mm is a common practice.
Resolution:
Set the resolution to 300 dots per inch (DPI). This ensures your images and text are crisp and clear when printed.
Folding Line:
Make sure that no important elements are crossing over the fold like. When creating your design, use a guide halfway down your page to help you keep background colours and graphics in their place.
Orientation:
For a tent fold design, make sure that the inside design is supplied 180 degrees upside down. When the print file is passed through our system, we flip the pages from left to right. Meaning that the inside spread needs to be upside down to back up correctly when printed. Please refer to our templates if you are unsure. More information - Orientation
Fonts:
Embed all fonts in your document to ensure they appear correctly when printed. In Adobe software, this is typically done automatically when you save as a PDF. Alternatively, you can outline your text to remove any font data.
Exporting for Print:
When you're ready to export your design, save it as a high-resolution PDF with the following settings:
- PDF/X-1a:2001
- Embed fonts.
- Use CMYK colour.
- Include crop marks to show where the card will be trimmed.