All you need to know about artwork pre-flighting.

If you’re supplying artwork to us, we offer an optional preflighting service at a cost of $45 ex-GST per job (not per piece of artwork).  The preflighting service includes us sending digital proofs of your artwork back to you for approval. 

Preflighting ensures your artwork will be checked by experienced designers that understand the templates and the finished products, giving you peace of mind and a faster, better quality printed product

When do I need to preflight?
The earlier in the process that problems are detected, the easier and cheaper it is to fix them. If you are using a graphic designer they should preflight your artwork themselves before sending it to an agency or printer.

However, with so many creative apps in the marketplace now, like Canva, more and more people are designing files themselves. Because of this, preflighting artwork does not always happen. Even if it has been checked by a graphic designer, they are not always aware of the intricacies of the design template or the print process and this can cause issues.

That is why it can be important to preflight your artwork before it goes to print. There are technologies available that check your PDFs for you so you can do this yourself, or you can get a designer to do it for you.

What are the biggest issues with artwork?
There are many things that can get missed with a design file, but some of the more common mistakes we see are that the image resolution is too small or the document size is not consistent with the template. These issues are generally easy to fix, but are best found early in the design process.

Based on our experience the top 5 issues identified in preflighting are:

1. Document size not consistent with the design template
2. Insufficient image resolution
3. Fonts not outlined (this is a bigger issue than it may seem and can result in unexpected print results)
4. Incorrectly specified colours, most commonly not set up in CMYK format
5. Artwork not 'flattened', meaning printed output may not be consistent with what you see on-screen

If you need support or advice regarding preflighting, just ask!