This is a tricky question to answer as it depends on the item being produced, but in all cases please remember that digital print equipment does break down, so please allow as much time as possible for your project to be produced.

You should always make sure that any fonts you have used to create your artwork are either supplied or embedded. The easiest way to do this is by saving your artwork in PDF format. There will be different options for font handling depending on the software you are using but you should look out for anything that mentions font embedding and make sure you have that option turned on.

If you supply artwork without either embedding the fonts or supplying the fonts to us, the printed job will probably not look how you expected it to as any text created using the missing fonts will be rendered using substituted fonts.

For reasons of aesthetics, we would always suggest making sure text is kept a reasonable distance away from the finished page edge. Also, there is always a certain amount of movement from one sheet to the next involved in printing, especially when printing digitally.

We would therefore suggest setting this distance (known as margins) as no less than 5mm wherever possible. The general rule is that as the print size increases, so should the margin size. For example, a 5mm margin would look fine on a business card but would make the text look very close to the page edge on an A0 size poster.

We usually recommend that artwork is supplied as a high resolution print-ready PDF file. Using the PDF or Portable Document Format to save your artwork is the safest way to ensure that your work will be printed as expected with no unpleasant surprises. The only time we would rather receive ‘native’ files ie those supplied in the same format they were created in would be for Adobe Indesign files that you would like us to make changes to. In this case, you would need to supply packaged artwork containing all fonts and images used. If you supply Microsoft Word or Powerpoint files, there is a danger that missing fonts may be substituted as mentioned above and the layout may also change depending on the version of the software and settings. This is why we would always strongly advise saving your work as pdf files and supplying those to us rather than the original Microsoft files.

The easiest way to send us your artwork is through our website. The ‘Get a quote’ form will allow you to upload a file directly and securely to us. If your artwork consists of multiple files simply add them to a single zip folder and send us that.

The easiest method is to highlight all of the files you need to send us and right click on them.

Within the drop down menu, you should see ‘send to’ as an option. If you click this option in the list, a second menu should pop out, and the top option is ‘compressed folder’. If you click this a window will appear that will walk you through the process of creating a zipped folder. Send us this folder and we will do the rest. It is almost identical on a Mac, but instead of ‘Send to’, you will see compress. Choose ‘Compress’ and a zip file will be produced.