Design Services

In today's market place good design is of increasing importance to put across the right image to your customers. Good design and one which is relevant to your business product or service will persuade and encourage your audience, whereas poor design can have a longer lasting damaging effect. It is a fact that a well crafted design will significantly increase response from your marketing campaign.

At Colourworks we have a fully equipped design studio. We can produce the right design to suit your requirements. Our dedicated team of professionals will guide you through the design process so that the end result is tailored to your company product or service.

Design costs will vary according to the nature of the project and therefore it is impossible to place a fixed price on design, however at Colourworks we recommend that our customers allocate at least a third of their print budget to design.

Whether you need a new logo, a simple flyer, stationery or a corporate brochure, our fully qualified design team will always strive to give your business that professional, quality image which delivers results.

Design tips

File formats
We are predominantly PC platform using industry standard design software. We can accept artwork from the major PC applications in the following versions or lower- Quark Xpress V.5, Adobe Illustrator V.10, Adobe PhotoShop V.7, Adobe PDF V.5, Corel Draw V.11. For any other application please call us to confirm format.

Macintosh
Most software applications today are cross platform compatible, e.g. a file created in Adobe Illustrator on a Macintosh can be opened in the same application on a PC. However there are some anomalies which may occur, so we recommend you contact us to discuss your artwork in detail.

Photographic images
Photographic images need to be saved as CMYK .tif files for PC.

Fonts
Font files are platform specific, which means fonts on a PC cannot be read on a Macintosh and vice versa. Also font files must be present with the artwork, therefore we recommend that you turn all your fonts to 'curves' when creating artwork. For futher information on fonts please contact us.

Bleed
Bleed means to be printed so as to go off the edge or edges of a page after trimming.
If a colour or image on your design runs to the edge of the page, it requires 'bleed' on your artwork. Bleed refers to an extra amount of colour or image which runs outside the cropping area. In short make your artwork larger than it's printed finished size.

Top 10 things to avoid
Today´s graphics applications are incredibly sophisticated. So much so, that many contain features not compatible with the latest developments in printing technology. Through our extensive experience, we´ve prepared a list of features that we know don´t work. So please, don´t use any of the items listed below.

Borders
Avoid a pronounced border (especially on business cards), since even a half millimetre movement when guillotined will be noticeable.

Corel Texture Fills
These print erratically (or not at all). Best to select the object with the fill and choose ´Convert to Bitmap´ from the ´Bitmaps´ menu. Make sure you choose 300dpi and CMYK though, and don´t make the background transparent.

Compression
You can happily use WinZIP of StuffIT to compress your files, but never compress images using LZW compression or JPEG encoding. Doing so will cause lots of problems and may result in your file not printing at all.

Duotone/RGB images
These will either print in black and white, or with very washed out colours – always convert to CMYK.

EPSs within EPSs
Not a good idea. Postcript errors are at their greatest when this is done. Please note, Quark is not happy with illustrator EPSs.

Hairlines
Hairlines are ´device dependent´. This means that they print at different resolutions on different machines. They may print fine on your laser printer, but will disappear on our 2500dpi plate-setter. Avoid using lines under 0.25pt.

OLE objects
Windows applications are happy to copy objects back and forth between themselves. Unfortunately, they don´t print properly. Always convert OLE objects to bitmaps before sending your file. See ´Corel Texture Fills´ above.

Overprint
Be careful with overprint settings (especially in Quark). If you set objects to overprint, they will not ´knock-out´ the background, and look very different to what you see on screen or proof. Black text is generally set as default to overprint. This is usually OK.

Postcript Fills
These also are erratic. They don´t look good anyway, use something else.

Quark Picture Boxes
A ´feature´of Quark Xpress is that if you don´t fill a picture box with colour, the TIFF inside may print with a ragged edge. So, make sure your picture box is filled with ´white´ rather than ´none´. Cut-out EPSs are OK.