The 5 Most Important Checks to Make Before You Send Your Designs to the Printer

When working on a new design project, it's important to ensure everything is perfect before you send it off to the printer. Any mistakes or problems with your designs can cause quality issues with your prints and may even turn away potential customers. Often, designers will run through a checklist of items before sending their designs to the printer to help ensure that everything is in order. Here are some of the most important checks to make before sending your designs off to the printer:

1. Check the Quality of your Artwork

You know what they say – that a picture is worth a thousand words. So before you send your designs to the printer, you need to ensure that your artwork is a winner. The best way to judge your artwork's quality is to grasp the concepts of good visual communication. First, you need to define the goal of the artwork. For instance, if it's a logo design, it needs to put your brand out there. So it should be catchy. If the artwork goes to the landing page, it must be persuasive. It's also important to ensure that your artwork is easy to understand but aesthetically pleasing at the same time. Your audience should be able to decipher your artwork instantly. 

2. Ensure that your Files are in the Correct Format

Once you have ensured everything is okay, it's time to save your designs and send them to the printer. There are hundreds of file formats, but which one should you work with? Your best option would be PDF – short for Portable Document Format. This format is very compact, so you can send your work much faster. Besides the impressive speed, the PDF format preserves all visual elements, be it text, graphics, or images. 

3. Make Sure All Colours and Fonts are Properly Set Up

It's not uncommon to have transparent areas or special effects in the design process. Sometimes, you might forget to flatten the layers of your work before sending them over. Therefore, it would be a brilliant idea to test your workout as a jpeg to ensure that all colours and effects are in place. You also need to do the same for text areas to avoid errors occurring in the printing process. 

4. Proofread your Designs 

Small mistakes, like a single typo, can cost you an arm and a leg in the business world. It can be the swinging vote on whether the customer will buy your product or go to a competitor. It's too huge a risk. That's why it's incredibly important to proofread your designs before you send them to the printer. 

Besides linguistic proofreading – things like spelling and flow of language – you also need to do graphic proofreading. Are there splitting words at the end of line breaks? Are the lines too long for your audience to follow through? Is the text spacing okay? And most importantly, is there general uniformity in your designs? Once you tick all these boxes, you can send over your work for print. 

5. Consider Working with a Professional Printer

You've done the hardest part, and it's time to bring your designs to life. This step is particularly important, so it's important to work with a professional printer. A professional can help you catch even the tiniest mistake and give your work a polished finish. Besides, a professional printer will give you a wide variety of paper stock to choose from. They will also advise you on the best paper to use.