Guidelines on Creating Drafts for Your Postcard

If you to this whole world of postcard printing, you might be experiencing some problems with getting your drafts accepted by postcard printing services. While certainly most of these firms will accept any kind of order, they will always advice customers as to the right settings for a design that will be ideal for their postcard printer. Believe me, these printing services are concerned with your designs as they would like to at least deliver to you similar postcards that professionals produce.

That is why for your custom postcard they will always require you to deliver drafts of at least a minimum quality ideal for full color postcard printing. Below, you will find the key characteristics and requirements needed in a design draft for printing premium quality full color postcards. Use this as a guide as you create your own design templates.

1. Get templates from the printer itself - To get your designs easily accepted for custom printing of postcards, it is a good idea to get templates from the printing service themselves. Since most of them require a certain size and shape for their machines, it would be easier for you to just use the templates they provide. Your design drafts should easily pass the first requirement for printing with no real trouble at all if you do this.

2. Review and check your margins and guidelines - It will be good to check your margins and guidelines in your draft. Some firms do not accept custom full color designs for postcards that have imperfectly formed margins and guidelines. This is because it can skew how the printing works, or just easily produce bad looking postcard prints unfit for publications. So check if you are using the right margins and guidelines, with your design features staying within the needed confines.

3. Adjust colors to CMYK - Many printing services will typically want to consult you back if you send them a draft with a color mode of RGB. This is especially true for typical four color printers because they use the CMYK printing process. When they convert your designs from RGB to CMYK some color changes may occur, leading to postcards that look not exactly the same as your original design.

To be safe and to save time, it is best that you do that easy conversion yourself so that you can adjust your designs accordingly. It is as simple as changing the color mode in your own design application.

4. Set images to high resolution - Postcard printing companies typically will give you back your drafts if your images are just in too low a resolution. This is because you will see pretty fuzzy postcard pictures if they were inserted in low resolution. So instead of getting that image from internet based sources, get to the most original and high resolution scans or the raw form in that digital camera. The higher the resolution the better.

5. Proofread text content - Of course, a standard practice in printing anything would be for you to proofread the text content. You do not want to mass producing your spelling and grammar errors. So make sure you triple check and proofread your text content to make sure they do not contain any gross errors in writing.

6. Provide all supporting materials for upload - It would be good to include all your supporting files when you upload your designs for printing postcards. This includes fonts, plug-ins and any other additional feature that the postcard printer needs to recreate your draft digitally in their end. Otherwise of course, they will not accept your order as the draft does not have the key requirements.

7. Provide different file formats of the draft - Lastly, as a safety measure, always provide different file formats of your draft. A zip file and an image file is usually recommended along with your own original document file for the postcards. This helps ensure that the postcard printer does receive your order properly with the required files along with their backup.

Combine all these practices and those postcard printing services will not have problems with any of your drafts. I know it requires an extra level of focus, but if you are really serious about printing postcards, you have to do this.

WOODRIDGE

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Guidelines on Creating Drafts for Your Postcard