Cleaning Your Design For Postcard Printing

Stop right there! Before that postcard printing order goes ahead, you might want to do some spring cleaning with your draft. While you might be confident about your use of postcard templates and of course your own talent for design, you should always try to review and clean up your design once it is done. More likely than not, your designs will still not be ready for postcard printing after the initial draft. So let me teach you the proper steps on spring cleaning when it comes to color postcard design. Let us start with the first step, text cleaning.

1. Cleaning up the spelling and grammar – You do not want to be embarrassed in postcard printing by producing badly spelled and wrongly worded color postcard. That is why it is important that you clean up the spelling and the grammar of your own color postcard draft. Leave the automatic spell check and grammar check of applications behind as these still are not the most perfect ways to clean up your layout. Try to do it by hand and check each text line for errors in spelling and grammar. READ EVERYTHING and have others read everything once over again. Check the whole draft for spelling and grammar errors 3 times to be sure that everything is 100% ready for postcard printing.

2. Cleaning the layout up – Once the text is cleaned up, you will want to clean the layout up as well. Do this by reviewing the positioning of your images, your text and your other design elements. See if there are stray pixels of images and misplaces words or lines. See if your layout is well balanced as well and of course make sure that everything is aligned properly in the correct orientation. Check and double check as you do not want to submit a skewed color postcard for printing.

3. Cleaning those images properly – Next, look at your postcard images thoroughly and see if they are indeed fit for postcard printing. Are their resolutions at 300dpi or higher? Is there a fuzziness to the images? Are the colors right and vivid enough for postcard printing? Is the cropping and scaling of the image done accurately, and aesthetically? Try to use image applications like Photoshop to enhance those images as much as you can so that they will be idea for mass production.

4. Making sure the margins and guides are correct – You should also look and see if the margins and guidelines are correct. Depending on the postcard template that you may have acquired, the margins and guides should take into account not only the correct dimensions of the whole postcard image and layout, but also the design bleeds that help compensate for variations in printing. As long as everything is set quite well without gross misalignments, there should be a great chance that your color postcards should turn out well.

5. Getting an extra eye for cleaning – Finally to eliminate designer bias in your draft, you should get someone else to clean out your designs after you have done all the refinements. Having a fresh set of eyes on a postcard printing draft can help you identify other problem areas that you ignored or never saw in the first creation. That is why it is recommended always to get a fresh new start and a fresh new eye for your color postcard printing drafts. Believe me, these extra checks will save your postcards from any kind of bad turnout.

So that is how you clean up your color postcards for printing. Make sure you do all these checks always. Good luck!

By: Brad Kartel

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Brad Kartel is a marketing executive whose passion is helping business owners build their campaign through custom postcard printing.