Top Tips for Promotional Printing in Different Formats

Whether you’re printing new staff uniforms, banners for a promotional event or an informational brochure about your services, high quality printed promotional products will boost your corporate identity, helping your company brand to be more memorable.

If your printed promotional products are not of a high quality however, they will have the opposite effect. Badly formatted graphics or text will look shoddy, unprofessional and unattractive to potential customers. So it is essential that you format any design correctly to get the best possible results when the information is printed.

Text File Formatting

If you are printing products that are solely text-based, you must remember that not all fonts and effects are available in every programme. If your printer’s equipment doesn’t support your chosen font, it may convert it to one that doesn’t suit your design or layout, creating a substandard product.

• To avoid this problem, make sure you convert your design file to a print-ready PDF before sending it to your printers. If you file is saved like this, your chosen font will be embedded into the document so the layout will not change even if the program in use doesn’t support it.
• Another option to consider could be to convert your font to a curve or outline format.  This means that even if your font isn’t supported on the printing system, the outline of the font converts to not spoil the overall effect of your product.
• Do not use .doc files as there is no guarantee the formatting, fonts and spacing will transfer over and look the same once uploaded to a different system.

Artwork and Graphic Formatting

Formatting artwork for printing has 2 main issues: recreating the colours effectively, and upholding the quality of the graphics.

• One of the worst things you can do is use web pages.  Web pages are designed to load as quickly as possible, and to ensure this happens they sometimes use poor quality images. So even if the image looks ok to you, once it’s been printed, any poor quality issues will be very obvious on your products.
• Make sure you provide your printer with the exact Pantone Matching System number for the colours you want to display on your printed products. Because this is a universal colour matching system you can be sure that you will be able to reproduce the exact colours chosen by your designer.
• If you are using an image with lots of different colours, consider using a .EPS format, as this will allow the different colours to be separated for printing, and also ensures they can be easily edited and resized if necessary, helping to maintain precision and quality.
• Do not use .JPG files as they are difficult to accurately resize, .BMP format as the resolution is too low to ensure a decent quality of image, or a .GIF as these images are meant to load quickly and use less colour so will have unpredictable results when printed.  

The key to producing high quality promotional printing is to prepare your designs carefully, choosing the perfect formats that will allow your artwork, graphics and fonts to be reproduced precisely and meticulously.

For more information about getting the most from your printed promotional products, and ensuring you make a great impression on clients, potential customers and competitors – simply contact the team at Banaman for expert advice.