Illustrator's Tip: 5 Easy Steps To Prepare Banner/Bunting For Printing

On today's Illustrator's tip of the day, I'm going to show you my method of preparing the banner or bunting file for printing. Do note that my method is not the absolute way to do it and there are plenty of ways to prepare them prior to sending it for printing.

The method I'm going to show here serves as a guideline for newbie designers so that they know how to get things started right.

1. CMYK Mode

The rule of thumb for creating any printing file is to start it with a CMYK mode. This is one important step that is often overlooked by designers. During my past work in digital printing industry, I noticed a lot of designer students adjusted colors with HEX Code or RGB color slider. It's not the right way to do it so it is advisable to start learning color mixing with basic CMYK.

2. Actual Size

Illustrator allows the designers to create the design file in different measurements such as:

• Points
• Picas
• Inches
• Millimeters
• Centimeters
• Pixels

In printing, I normally use the inches or millimeters and again, this is just my way of doing it. You are free to use centimeters or any others depend on personal preference. However, pixels is not recommended for preparing a printed file.

For this example, the bunting size is 15 Feet x 3 Feet so the actual size for this artwork would be 180 Inches x 36 Inches.

3. PPI Setting

Since banner and bunting is viewed at a distance away, the dots per inch (ppi) can be set at lower value as contrary to the one that you will normally setup in a magazine, which is 300 ppi.

Therefore, it always a good idea to set it at the range between 100 and 150 ppi to be safe and to preserves it clarity in printings.

4. Save in JPG

Previously in my post, I have discussed about the XWorks: Design's Tip: Flattening Image. Have a brief reading to understand the importance of it as this somehow related in this step.

5. Ready to Print

Now everything is ready and all that left to do is to send this to your printing supplier for printing. Do leave your comments whether you think this is useful or vice versa.

Illustrator's Tips: Rasterizing Image

It has been a norm for most of us, designers, to work on very high resolution images in our work. The least thing that we likely want it to happen is to see our artwork/design printed out in blown out or jagged, catastrophe quality.

In such scenario, most of us would choose to embed all the image files on our final design, which is not favorable by the printing shops. The file normally will end up to few hundreds of MB and it is the arch-rival on lower-end computers. The computers are crashed, the whole operation is delayed and you see unhappy faces starring back at you.

An alternative solution, other than embedding your image files, would be Rasterize... Contrary to Embed, Rasterize resizes the image at its appropriate sizes and resolution as defined by the designers. The Embed, on the other hand, merely flatten the image files at its original high resolution size, which makes your final printing file at infinite file size.

Illustrator's Tips: Increase Performance

There are times when freelancers have to work with really huge files without sufficient computer memory (RAM) at their disposals to load these files or perform certain crucial actions in Illustrator.

Here is a quick tips on how performance can be improved in Illustrator.

1. Go to Illustrator > Preferences > Plug-ins & Scratch Disks...

2. At Scratch Disks, leave the Primary: as it is. Meanwhile, select the bigger disk you have for Secondary:
3. There it is; it might not improve heavenly and earth but it does make a difference when working on large files in design