Whether it’s commercial printing, promotional products or trade show items, we give personalized attention, are highly responsive and are always reliable. Have questions about a project? Bring them to us. Need a sample to show a customer? Consider it shipped. We care about your business, about your customers, and about you.

Print terms can be a bit intimidating as you’re getting started.  Let’s clarify some of these for you to make the printing process go smoothly and your project turn out to be amazing.

Production Terms

Crop Marks / Trim Marks

These marks indicate the final size of a printed piece and where each piece will be cut or trimmed to be made into that final size.

Margins

Important copy, artwork and other content all need to be at least 1/4” away from the edge of your printed piece so that it doesn’t run the risk of being cut off due to mechanical variations when the printed piece is trimmed to its final size.

Bleed

When a design extends past the page edge (and the trim or crop marks), it is said to “bleed.” It’s important that your document always includes a bleed, this ensures that there’s no chance of a white border after a printed piece is trimmed.

Color Management

CMYK (four-color or process color)

CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Combinations of very small dots of ink in these four colors are used in printing to create nearly the full range of colors we can see.

RGB (red, green and blue)

The three colors of light typically used to display full-color images on a screen (like a computer monitor, TV, or tablet). RGB and CMYK are not the same, and artwork created in RGB mode will look a bit different when it prints in CMYK! We encourage you to make sure that digital artwork files are converted from RGB to CMYK before you submit them so that you can preview any color shift that occurs in the conversion. If you need assistance in converting images from RGB to CMYK, don’t hesitate to ask us! We are happy to help.

Grayscale

Black and white images and artwork should be converted to grayscale. When printed, grayscale images are made up of small dots of black ink, and the density (or lack of) these dots determines the shade of gray that image area will print as, ranging all the way from black to white.

PMS / Spot Color

The Pantone Matching System (PMS) is the industry standard used to specify ink colors other than C, M, Y or K. Artwork may be specified as two-color or as having spot color, meaning it will print with in two PMS colors or black and a PMS color.

Resolution

Dots per inch (dpi) is a measurement that indicates the resolution (sharpness and overall quality) of an image. Files and images for print must have a minimum dpi of 300, as compared to images for the web that are often at 72 dpi.

Read our blog post about Image Resizing and Photo Resolution Explained to learn more.