Setting Up Your Artwork Canvas

For customers not familiar with creating artwork for large-format print, we have created this guide to make sure your designs can be processed and printed as quickly and accurately as possible.

Canvas Size

When creating your design canvas, the most important thing to remember is that your artwork should be setup at an equal proportion to the print you are ordering. If your order is for a banner with a 3:1 proportion, your artwork should perfectly match this.

It's often best to use a smaller scale, such as half-scale or quarter-scale as this can reduce filesize. If your design exceeds 5m in either direction, please use a smaller scale.

Adobe software and PDFs have an in-built limit of 5080mm for either width or height. However, some software (such as CorelDRAW), allow the creation of canvases beyond this size. Unfortunately, this will cause issues at our end, and this should be avoided.

For instance, a 5m × 1m design could be created like so:

To calculate the canvas width and height you'll need for a smaller scale, simply take your full-size measurement (eg. 5000mm) and multiply it by your desired scale. We've included these below:

So, for a quarter-scale design:

5000 × 0.25 = 1250

Crop Marks

Crop marks are not required as standard, but they may be useful for customers that provide artworks within a larger artboard/canvas/page, where we would need the marks to use as a positional reference.

If your artboard/canvas/page is setup correctly to the size and proportion of the ordered item, crop marks are not necessary.

If you are providing crop marks in your artwork, please make sure these are kept outside of any bleed areas, especially on fabric and double-sided graphics. This allows us to make full use of the bleed, if necessary in the case of movement when printing or finishing.

If crop marks are positioned within your bleed, we cannot guarantee that they won't be visible on the finished item, due to movement when printing or finishing.

Colour Mode

All artworks should be created in CMYK colour mode. Artworks sent to us in RGB mode will be converted to CMYK by our pre-press system, and will nearly always render unsatisfactory results.

Bleed

All standard banner and print artworks should be supplied with at least 5mm bleed (when scaled to full-size). This ensures your printed design can be hemmed or trimmed with no white edges showing.

For 740gsm Double-Sided PVC banners, artworks must be supplied with at least 10mm bleed.

For Bespoke Flags, Display Polyester, Backlit Polyester, and Stretch Fabric, artworks must be supplied with at least 30mm bleed.

Please make sure that any supplied bleed area is not overlapped by:

• Crop marks
• Bleed marks
• Colour bars
• Registration marks
• Any other marks

These marks are often added with default PDF export settings - please disable them before exporting.

If any marks are positioned within your bleed, we cannot guarantee that they won't be visible on the finished item, due to movement when printing or finishing.

Keylines and Trim Lines

Please avoid supplying keylines or trim lines in your artwork, espeically if your graphic is to be trimmed to size.

If keylines are provided in your artwork, we cannot guarantee that they won't be visible on the finished item, due to movement when printing or finishing.

The only exception to this is when ordering a shape-cut item.

For Roller Banners

The easiest way to create your Roller Banner artwork is to use our pre-made templates, which are available for you to download. These are setup at the correct proportion, and also include guides to ensure your design fits perfectly in the unit.

However, if you need to create your Roller Banner canvas yourself, please make sure to get the width and height correct as these come in a variety of sizes.

Roller Banners also require an additional section at the bottom of your graphic, which will be rolled into and hidden within the unit mechanism. This area is very important and can vary in size, depending on the model of unit you will be using. For our units, the height of this area is 150mm, so typically the height of the graphic will be 2150mm. This 150mm section should be kept free from any important content (text, logos) and only used for background images and colours.