Online Print Shop: Advertising Material Bleed, CMYK Color Mode & Ordering

Print promotional materials! The small 1×1 for companies and startups. Many companies have their advertising materials professionally created in an advertising agency or by a designer they trust. But often you don’t need a reprint of your own promotional materials until a few years later. Maybe the designer is no longer in the same city or you already got the finished print materials on your first job. Then you can easily order reprints yourself. On the Internet there are numerous providers for this, the printers make possible from the first business card to flyers to elaborate advertising materials as well as trade fair and promotional materials.

Today we had a practical case, a customer who has commissioned her design a few years ago with us, needed reprints. Since not even changes should be made, I wanted to use the time and show you in a small video, how a print file is created in principle and how easy an order is at a print shop.

Bleed margin is important when ordering

Regardless of the print shop, a bleed margin is required for all orders. This depends on the print shop and ranges from 1 millimeter to 4 millimeters. Why is such a bleed margin created? Depending on the printing press, huge rollers with kilometers of paper run through it every second. This results in minimal movements and the trim can deviate by one to four millimeters. This is why a bleed margin is created before printing. The right color mode is also important for printing.

The difference between RGB and CMYK for prints

The RGB color mode is used for digital image processing, such as on monitors. Here small LED lights are used, these shine in red, yellow or blue. Depending on how you mix the colors, you get completely new color combinations. If you mix all three colors, that is red, yellow and blue together, you get white. It is different with the print, if all colors play together here, it does not become black but brown. That’s why you don’t use three colors but four. Even though black is not really a color. CMYK simply means cyan, magenta and yellow, or the English word “yellow”. The “K” stands for the black tone. In a print shop, all the different colors are applied one after the other, thus creating the mixtures. The fourth color layer is then black. In the video I explain a little more in detail what it is about trimming, color selection and the final printing process.

Video Tutorial: Bleed, CMYK Color Mode & Print Order