You need to print posters for your brand?
From our experience, we couldn´t live without Adobe Illustrator, it can be insanely useful for creating graphics for web, print, logos or anything. Illustrator is a vector drawing program, this makes vector graphics scalable without the loss of resolution, perfect for any visual content but in this case, print work.
From our professional experience of creating posters, mupi´s, flyers and so on, the key step for printing is when you open Adobe Illustrator and create a new file, make sure you have the options below selected for a high quality print.
Size:
When comes to print, don´t choose pixels but instead choose mm or cm.
Bleed:
The bleed is an extra area that you add to your design to make sure there's no "white border" once your print design is cut. The cutters that print shops use is not 100% perfect, pages might not be aligned or printed perfectly.
Usually the standard measure is 3mm or 0,3cm but here depends on the design/printer request.
Color Mode:
When your design will be printed, you should always pick CMYK cause is used for printed media, while RGB is used for monitors, televisions, projection, and other light-based display technologies.
Raster Effects:
Here you choose how many pixels will fit in an inch, aka ppi (pixels per inch).
Visual content for a web pages and social media, you only need 72 ppi (relatively large pixels), but for high quality print it needs to be 300 ppi so they don't look pixellated in the final printed work.
After you select these options, you click ok and you can start your design. After the design is done, approved and ready to save for your print shop, there is a few steps you should consider, such has;
Outline your text
Outlined text means to convert your text into a vector shape, this is done mostly cause the computer of your print shop might not have the font you used or any font installed, this way when the file is open you wont lose your fonts. The process of outlining fonts is quite simple in Illustrator.
Select the text with the Selection Tool > Right Click and then Select Create Outlines.
Save as PDF
PDF format is for documents that are intended to be printed for the quality and the big advantage of compressing high-quality files to a relatively small file size, perfect to save space in your hard drive or when email it to a client/printshop.
To do so just follow the steps below:
File > Save as
Write the file name and choose Adobe PDF below
On the next window, choose the PDF/X-1a:2001 pattern and Adobe Acrobat 4 in Compatibility
Save PDF
We hope these tips will help you in the future when designing print work for your brand or clients. Let us know if you have questions or need assistance with Adobe Illustrator.