How to make your artwork ready for print

Making an image ready for print can sometimes be confusing, therefore we have made this guide to explain how the Printeers Platform handles print images and how to make the perfect design. We will cover the file size, positioning, some product specific requirements and image rendering.

This guide mostly covers making universal images. We will also cover making a file exactly sized for one product, however this is a lot of work and not used by most partners.

This guide applies to you if:

First, let’s start with a list of requirements.

Positioning works slightly different per product type. Below we will describe how to create the perfect image for each product type.

An image used for back printed cases is always cut on the left and right side because the product is portrait oriented. Make sure the important parts of the design are in the center of the image. Left and right should only contain bleeding. Making your image this way makes sure that we can always cut your image from the center and when the final product is more narrow, you won’t lose important parts of the design.

How it will be cropped

How it looks on a case

Images on fully printed cases are cropped a bit wider then back printed cases as we also print the sides and even a part of the front of the case. You cannot see this on the image renders but the print goes all the way to the screen of the phone. Make sure your design also covers this. Don’t put any important information on the sides. We cannot guarantee that texts or logos on the sides are printed perfectly aligned.

How it will be cropped

How it looks on a case

When making a design for a fully printed wallet, make sure you align your content centered on the right half of the image. That is the front of the wallet. The left 50 percent is the back of the wallet. You can’t use the same image as back printed as this will result in your important parts of the design be printed on the back of the wallet. The only exception is seamless patterns without logo’s or positioned content.

How it will be cropped

How it looks on a wallet

This is the most labour intensive way of designing, but you have the most control of what is aligned where. This works as follows:

1. Get the millimeter print size from the product list
2. Open a Photoshop document with this size @ 300 DPI
3. Make your design

For fully printed deluxe cases, make sure you have enough bleeding to fill the sides and don’t put any important elements on the side of the image.

Unlike paint, inks are transparent. Therefore if you print ink on a surface that is not white, you can see through the ink and this makes hard to see the ink color. To make a color more vibrant and make the print visible its required to print a white base layer before applying the colored inks. Under every colored pixel in a design, we print a white pixel first. This white ink is made to not see through and make the color pop out. Therefore it’s not possible to make semi transparent prints. However it is possible to make parts of the print fully transparent. This could for example be used when only printing  a logo in the center or cover a case partially with a pattern. Make sure your print has no semi transparent parts, only 100% transparent or 100% covered parts.

If you want to know if your design is correct, we have a nice tool to verify your design. You can use our product image renderer to generate an image of how the product will look when printed. This renderer uses our accurate print size to generate a preview, so what you see in this image is exactly what will be printed. You need an account for the Printeers Webshop to make renders but no worries, this account is free and easy to create.