Prepping a file for a print shop — Part 1
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So you want something printed, well, that’s great! You’ve come to the right place. Whether you’re having a designer edit your work, or you fancy yourself a designer and plan to hand over your files, there are just a few you need to do to make it an easy process.
Building Your File Step 1: Choose your Design/Layout program(s) Choosing the right program for designing your project is critical. Follow these guidelines when choosing the programs you will use.
Adobe Photoshop
• For photographs and rasterized images only.
• Text is printed best in other applications like Illustrator or InDesign.
• When using Photoshop, DO NOT enlarge images because this will result in pixelated images and poor print quality.
• Rasterized images in Photoshop lose quality when scaled up or down.
Adobe Illustrator
• Illustrator works with vector images which are mathematical formulas.
- Vector images created in Illustrator can be scaled up or down without losing quality
• Illustrator is great for text used as a design element or logos.
Adobe InDesign
• This is a layout program that combines text and graphics for print.
• It is best to compose large areas of text in InDesign rather than Illustrator or Photoshop.
• Place images designed in Photoshop or Illustrator into your InDesign layout to bring everything together and get it ready for print production
Microsoft Word and Publisher
Word and Publisher can be helpful when creating large bodies of text. However, as a design/layout tool, they are not nearly as functional or robust as InDesign. If your product has images, I DO NOT recommend using Word or Publisher as your primary design tool because quality is a concern. In addition, when Word or Publisher documents open on different computers, with other operating systems or different versions of the software, the layout could be changed, fonts may not appear correctly, and images may have lost quality. For these reasons, I recommend using InDesign for final layout purposes.
Part 2 is coming soon.
