Artwork

There are three ways to give artwork to your commercial printing company.

Camera Ready Art: This is the process of you developing your artwork and delivering the "camera ready" hard copy art to the printing company. In this case, what you see is what you get. In fact the the reproduction process in printing (going from one process to another) with the same art will result in a 0.5% - 3% loss of quality between each process. Therefore it is recommended to have as few reproductions in the process as possible. Example: You supply camera ready art on a piece of 70# bond, the printing company will transfer that image onto a plate or film using a camera, then onto a plate for the press, then the plate will transfer the image onto a blanket that will transfer onto the paper. In this example you have the art transferring 4 times, if you lose an average of 2% quality each time, you have lost 8% of your quality (Image crispness, screen quality). In some cases this can be acceptable in other cases it is not.

Digital Art Supplied: In this process you prepare the art with a computer program, or have it done, and then give this disk to your commercial printer. They will then take this file and produce a negative or plate with less then 1% quality degradations. The problems that you can have in this process is poor quality images in the art file (low resolution), missing fonts, wrong color scheme in images (RGB, CMYK or Spot colors), poorly placed art for post production or bindery (folding etc.) and non standard computer programs used to make the file. Even using a professional designer can create some problems between them and the printing company. If everything goes right, this is a great way to use your creativity to produce the project you really want.

Full Service Production: This is the process of taking your ideas, photographs and artwork to the printing company and having a design professional construct your project in house. The advantages of doing this is they will insure all graphics and processes are correctly formatted to ensure the highest quality using the equipment they have. This is usually the best way to have your art made if quality or registration is an issue.

Things to remember: You own your art,even if you didn't make it. It is recommended to get a copy of all your art on disk, and keeping it safe for future use. You can usually use all or parts of the past jobs in future projects. Always keep good high quality copies of your logos on disk.