File Preparation and Prepress – A Recipe for Success
When conceptualizing your print job, it’s helpful to imagine you are following a recipe. Skipping a step or leaving out an element is a surefire way to mess up your cake – er, print job. Today, we’re going to discuss one of the absolutely critical “ingredients” to your print job recipe – good file preparation and the prepress department.
Prepress is the critical step between your artwork design file and the production department. Prepress is responsible for examining your file for possible errors in layout or potential red flags and making sure your artwork is optimized to get the best possible results on the individual presses that will be producing your work. SunDance consolidates our prepress and printing departments under one roof, which means our prepress team and press operators can work hand in hand to achieve great (and tasty) results. We use a mix of advanced software and personal attention to make sure your job is ready for press, but we can only work with the raw ingredients we are given.
SunDance has compiled several tutorials on how to correctly prepare your files for press, detailing everything from the best way to render rich black text to proper margins for full bleed images, and we strongly suggest you review these tutorials before beginning any print job. After all, it’s a lot easier to start with quality ingredients than it is to try and fix an inedible disaster later.
The SunDance tutorials may be found here!
If you have any questions on file preparation or are ready to take your next idea to print, please give us a call or drop us an email. We’d love to work with you! Click here to connect with us!
As a successful working artist, Joanna brings a unique perspective to every customer’s printing project. With over twenty years in the fine art and wide format printing industry and plenty of hands-on experience, she understands that attention to detail, quality materials, and a dash of creativity is key in producing a piece that you are proud to stand behind. Her commitment to customer satisfaction and willingness to explore “outside the box” solutions to difficult or unusual printing requests make her a welcome addition to the SunDance team. When she is not creating commissioned equestrian artwork for her clients or art galleries she is often found jumping over fences on her Thoroughbred horse or relaxing at home with her husband and their four dogs, two cats, three turtles, and African Grey parrot. She is also an accomplished violinist, avid amateur kayaker, and is extremely uncomfortable talking about herself in the third person.