Help & FAQs
Having trouble with your file or need some help? Check out some frequently asked questions. If you’re still having issues, please drop us a line or visit us in our Burleigh Heads studio. We’ll be happy to help you out!
Having trouble with your file or need some help? Check out some frequently asked questions. If you’re still having issues, please drop us a line or visit us in our Burleigh Heads studio. We’ll be happy to help you out!
We offer both offset and digital printing using state of the art machinery. Quantities under 5000 are typically printed on our commercial digital printers while quantities above this are most economically printed on offset printers.
Anything above A3 in size, is large format. Printing of Fine Art, Plans, Banners, Posters, Vinyl Stickers, Foam Core and Coreflute. Printing can be on to paper stock, vinyl or other types of material.
We will advise you when you submit a print job what the turnaround time will be. After approval of a printed proof, most jobs will have a same day or 24 hour turn around. However, larger or complex print runs and offset printing usually takes 5-7 working days.
Computer screens display colours using RGB colour profiles, our printers use CMYK colour profiles. Colours can even appear different from screen to screen because they are all calibrated differently. This is why it is very important to come in to the studio and see a printed proof of your job.
All images should be 300dpi or more at 100% of the image size in order to print clearly.
Yes, we can print spot colours on all offset printing.
We have a wide range of paper stock to select from and while we try to keep a good selection of this in store we sometimes have to order stock in for specific jobs. This is for two reasons, firstly because paper is a highly sensitive material and needs to be stored in perfect conditions to maintain its quality and secondly because there are so many different stocks we simply don’t have enough room to keep them all in our studio. Our most popular stocks are as follows:
In addition, we have a large range of specialty stock on hand, including Recycled Conqueror, Ivory Linen and Kraft. Visit our studio to see our full range.
This is the most common type of file supplied to a printer. A PDF needs to be supplied at high resolution with crop marks and 3mm of bleed.
Vector artwork is a scalable format of electronic artwork. This format is commonly used for the supply of logos and large format signs. Vector artwork can be scaled to any size with no loss of clarity. These include .ai and .eps files.
Where printing is done on a sheet of continuous paper, usually at high speed for large volumes. Usually used for large run magazines and newspapers.
USB Memory Stick, SD Card, CD, DVD
Please contact us and we will email one to you. Alternatively, come and visit us in our studio.
Our prices are competitive and work on a sliding scale. The more you print, the cheaper it becomes. Drop us a line and we’ll put together a quote for you.
Absolutely. We will look over your file for any obvious signs of problems for no charge. If changes are required, we can make those changes for a small design fee. We cannot be held responsible for negative colour matching, cropping of words and or quality of images. We always recommend signing off on a printed proof before commencing with the print run.
No problem. You can email your files to us and we can post or courier your printing to you. We do recommend seeing a printed proof before commencing with the print run. Colours will vary to what you see on screen, as long as you consent to this, it is no problem.
All jobs require payment in full before we can move to production. If you have approved credit with our company our terms, unless stated otherwise are 30 days.
The maximum colour application is derived from the sum of each colour channel CMYK. For example 80% Cyan + 100% Magenta + 100% Yellow + 50% Black = 330%. Based on production technicalities a maximum total color application of 330% is possible. For uncoated paper, this is lowered to 300%. For high speed printing it should be a maximum of 260% due to the reduced drying time and the possibility of smudging.
RGB and CMYK are the two most prominent and typical colour spaces / formats / models used in the world of design. In print, web, or digital media, a basic understanding of what the differences are, means a designer can vastly improve the quality of a project and the client can understand the colour matching limitations.
RGB (Red, Green, Blue) is the typical colour space used by computer monitors, mobile phones and televisions. In RGB, images are created by combining red, green, and blue light. Process of addition can create millions of different colours by using varying concentrations of the primaries. So when designing a website, web banner, buttons, e-newsletter, etc., your images and files should be set to this profile. Chances are any image you receive will be RGB by default, but it’s always a good practice to check.
CMYK is the primary colour model used by colour printers. So for flyers, brochures, advertising, newsletters, direct mail pieces, etc., a CMYK profile may provide better quality results or a better expectation of what your results will be. CMYK creates different colours in a subtractive process using four colours or inks: cyan (blue), magenta (red), yellow, and black. Chances are your inkjet or laser printer at home has a CMYK or CMYK variant setup. There are many RGB colours that CMYK printers cannot reproduce. Something that looks good on the monitor may not retain that quality in the printed piece.
Why colours look different
RGB System – Screen Viewing Only.
RGB colour system is only suitable for screen reproduction such as LCD and CRT computer monitors and TV screens. This is not suitable colour matching for printing or to colour match from, as each screen may represent colours differently. What may look fine on one screen, may be look completely different on another. This can be due to a number of reasons, whether it be due to individual screen settings such as brightness and contrast or even may be due to different monitor manufactures; i.e. Sony or LG.
The red, green, and blue components are the amounts of red, green, and blue light that an RGB colour contains and are measured in values ranging from 0 to 255. To see these values, open a drawing program on your computer and delve deep into the colour settings. Also you can view some values on new models of CRT and Digital Monitors.
The RGB colour model is an additive colour model. Additive colour models use transmitted light to display colour. Monitors use the RGB colour model. When you add red light, blue light, and green light together, so that the value of each component is 255, the colour white displays. When the value of each component is 0, the result is pure black.
CMYK/process – digital printing
The CMYK, also known as Process colours are generally used in digital printing for signage. CMYK refers to the four colours used; Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black to generate a colour. It is these four colours which are mixed together to make up other colours, much the same principal to how paint is colour matched.
One thing to note is that CMYK colours may not look identical to physical colours due to the restriction to the number of colours CMYK can reproduce and that Inks perform differently. For example, orange is very hard to reproduce, and can look very muddy in when printed digitally. We take care to register all images with our four colour bars applied to all printing we do. In this manner, the production crew can quickly and visually check the print at different stages. If a final colour is not accurately made, there is little we can do. It is a technology thing.
The CMYK colour model defines colour using the following components:
C Cyan Ink (this is a light blue ink colour)
M Magenta Ink (this is a hot pink ink colour)
Y Yellow (yellow ink)
K Black (Black ink, the character ‘k’ is used so as not to get confused with the ‘b’ in RGB. RGB was invented first we believe.)
The cyan, magenta, yellow, and black components are the amounts of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink that a CMYK colour contains and are measured in percent from 0 to 100.
The CMYK colour model is a subtractive colour model. Subtractive colour models use reflected light to display colour. Printed materials are produced using the CMYK colour model. When you combine cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, so that the value of each component is 100, the result is black. When the value of each component is 0, the result is pure white.
Your choice of paper is essential to your print’s final look and feel. It also dictates where and how the finished product is best used. For example, heavy durable stock is more suitable for products with a long shelf-life. ie Business Cards, however, if budget is a consideration, a more affordable, thinner stock might be a better choice.
WHICH WEIGHT WILL WORK?
Paper weight is measured in GSM, or grams per square metre. The higher the GSM value, the thicker and sturdier the paper. This can communicate subtle cues about your brand and your message. Thicker stocks imply a more premium product or service.
80–100gsm
Perfect for letterheads and general stationery.
150gsm
Good quality flyers, brochures, and booklets.
170gsm
Premium corporate brochures, calendars and quality posters.
200–250gsm
Not quite card thickness, this is great for premium flyers, brochures and vouchers.
300–350gsm
Strong and rigid; good for standard business cards, menus, postcards and premium booklet covers.
420gsm
Ideal for business cards, swing tags, and product packaging.
WHAT ABOUT THE FINISH?
Once you’ve selected the weight, it’s time to consider the finish. This adds another layer of tangible engagement and can influence your target audience as they hold the finished product in their hands. Just like GSM, your choice of paper finish will determine the overall look and feel of your printed piece.
Uncoated paper
No glare and highly ink-absorbent, reducing the risk of smudging. Perfect for text-heavy forms like manuals, letterheads, tickets and memo paper.
Silk Matte paper:
Often used for reports, flyers, postcards and magazines due to its high-quality feel.
Gloss coated paper:
The shiny surface makes it a perfect match for vibrant colours and high-contrast prints. A favourite for high-end magazines, brochures and booklets.
Celloglaze:
A thin sheet of plastic film, fixed to either one or both sides of a printed sheet of heavy paper stock to create extra durability. Available in gloss matte or soft touch velvet.
Spot Gloss:
Adds a luxe shiny finish when used in combination with matte celloglaze.
Paper is often described in terms of its density which is measured by its weight. This is termed as the grams per square metre, abbreviated to gsm. When you are asked what weight or gsm you want your job printed on, it means how thick or heavy do you want the paper to be. The lower the gsm the more transparent the paper is.
Standard copy paper that you find in most offices or homes is 80gsm and suited to black & white printing. Our standard colour printing is done on a 100gsm paper as this is a denser paper stock it holds the heavier ink coverage, often present in colour printing and gives a higher quality finish. Items that will be heavily handled and need longevity, such as business cards, need to be printed on a denser stock. We recommend at least a 350gsm card stock for these print jobs.
Burleigh Print & Design have digital machines which are able to process paper and card stock ranging from 80gsm up to 350gsm. We are also able to print on denser stock with larger offset print runs.
Once you have decided on what weight paper stock you need, there is also a choice of finishes including: matt, gloss or velvet celloglaze.
We are happy to recommend the best paper weight to suit your individual print job and invite you to come in and have a look at our paper samples.
Here at Burleigh Print & Design we can print a large variety of sizes and have the tools to customise your print job to almost any specified size you may require.
Here is a list of the standard sizes you are likely to need:
A0 841mm x 1188mm
B1 707mm x 1000mm
A1 594mm x 841mm
A2 420mm x 594mm
A3 297mm x 420mm
A4 210mm x 297mm
A5 148mm x 210mm
A6 105mm x 148mm
DL 99mm x 210mm
If you keep folding the piece of paper in half you create the next size down, for instance A4 is half of an A3.
We can also create custom sizes so if you need something a little different just let us know.
A logo is not just a mark – a logo reflects a business’s commercial brand via the use of shape, fonts, colour, and / or images. It inspires trust, recognition and admiration for a company or product and it is our job as designers to create a logo that will do this. It is helpful if you know what makes a great logo so you understand our process and can help point us in the right direction for your design. Here are some basic guidelines for logo design and some common mistakes that are made.
A logo must be simple
A simple logo design allows for easy recognition and allows the logo to be versatile & memorable. Good logos feature something unexpected or unique without being overdrawn.
Knowing how your logo is going to be used, both in size and media, can help your designer create a logo that’s appropriate in terms of complexity. When the size of a complex design is reduced it loses detail and can be difficult to reproduce and may look like a mistake.
It is a common mistake to use too many fonts in a design. This creates confusion as does a poor choice of font. It is important to find the right balance between the icon and the font so they are not competing for attention and it is standard practice to use a maximum of 2 fonts of different weights.
A complex logo can be difficult to remember as too much detail takes viewers longer to process. A memorable logo is a simple logo as can be seen by the famous examples of Nike, Apple and McDonald’s.
A logo must be unique
While it can be helpful to look at logos that your competitors or industry are using, this should never be used as a guide to creating your logo. The idea is to stand out in a cluttered marketplace and to be different than your competitors or better still to have a logo that’s better than theirs.
A common mistake is to cut corners and try to save time and money by using ‘cookie-cutter’ options. While it is tempting to use stock art, free logo templates, and clip art this means that your design will not be unique.
It is also important to avoid any legal copyright issues by plagiarising other logos.
A logo must be timeless
An effective logo should be timeless – that is, it will stand the test of time. Will the logo still be effective in 10, 20, 50 years?
It’s important to not rely on trends as these become overused clichés and they should be avoided. You can learn off the success or failure of other logos to see what works and what doesn’t.
A logo must be versatile
An effective logo should be able to work across a variety of applications. For this reason a logo should be designed using vector graphics software, to ensure that it can be scaled to any size without pixelation. It is also much easier to edit vector format and it can easily be adapted to any media. It is useful to think about what applications you would like to use your logo on, for example, stationery, store signage, car signage, embroidered uniforms, promotional materials, website, and billboards.
While it is useful to consider the colours in your logo and we will take all colour selections into consideration, it is advisable that the logo doesn’t rely on colour for effect. It should look good if presented in just one colour.
A logo must be appropriate
It is natural to want to like your logo, however it is important to keep in mind that your logo needs to be appropriately positioned within your industry and be designed to appeal to your customers. For example, if you are designing a logo for children’s party service, it would be appropriate to use a childish font and colour scheme. This would not be so appropriate for a law firm. Consider the essence of your company, is it serious or whimsical, and remember to design for the client, not yourself.
Professional Design
As you can see, there is a lot to take into consideration when designing a logo for your business and it is easy to make an ineffective logo. When you are in the market to have a new logo developed there is always the temptation to take some shortcuts, usually to save time, money or a combination of both. Amateur options include using instant websites, bidding wars/ design contests, logo templates, friends of friends and DIY home design using clipart. The trouble is, most of these ‘cookie cutter’ solutions turn out to be neither inexpensive nor fast and may cause a ton of headaches down the road, especially when your company starts to become more high profile. There is only one valuable way to design an original and effective logo and that is to work with an experienced professional. Burleigh Print & Design is able to offer you a design solution.
What to come to us with:
When you are ready to design a logo for your business it would be helpful to our designers if you could bring the following along with you:
The final part of the printing process where the printed item is trimmed to exact size, collated, bound into a book or catalogue format and then packed and dispatched.
Sometimes, a panel of colour on the page runs to the very edge. Because the process of trimming or binding a page is not exact to the fraction of a millimetre, ink needs to run over the edge of the page so the colour and/or the image look neat.
Trim marks appear on artwork and are used by the printer to cut the sheet of paper to the exact size once it has been printed. These are included because many copies are often printed on the same large sheet of paper to save time.
Where a cut is made in a stock using a special knife. It is like a cookie cutter which makes a specific shape exactly the same on all items in bulk rather than one by one. It can also be used to create fold lines by simply creasing the stock rather than cutting it.
Using high-resolution images in your layout is a critical step toward creating a professional looking printing job. If you submit something for print that isn’t the proper resolution, your images will come out ‘soft’, blurry, or even pixelated.
The images you see on your computer monitor are only 72 dpi (dots-per-inch), which is fine for viewing on a monitor, but very inadequate for a professional-looking printed brochure. Your images should be at least 300 dpi to print clearly with full sharpness. There are a variety of stock image sites on the web where you can obtain inexpensive, high-resolution, royalty-free images to use in your brochure designs, we often use www.istockphoto.com . Some stock image sites even offer free high-resolution pictures you can use for your artwork.
DPI: Dots per inch. The number of dots or pixels in a single inch. The more dots the higher the quality of the picture (more resolution, more sharpness and clearer detail)
Resolution: The easiest way I can explain resolution is to say that more resolution means an image displays more detail (or is capable of displaying more detail). Higher DPI means higher resolution.
Professional Printing: 300dpi is standard, sometimes up to 600dpi will give a better result.
Home Printing: You can get away with 200dpi images on a home inkjet printer with good results.
Web: 72dpi, always.
If you are sending someone images to use for print and they tell you the images are “too small” odds are the resolution wasn’t high enough. The image might look great and huge on your computer but is actually really small when printed out. To add to the confusion, your monitor resolution will also determine how big the picture appears to you when viewing it on your computer. The same sized monitor set to 800×600 while show an 800 wide by 600 tall image as a full screen image. On a monitor that is 1600×1200 the image will only take up 1/4 the screen.
If you’re supplying files to printers or your design team, this concept is critical. For the best quality colour printing on a non digital printing press, a resolution of 300 or more Dots Per Inch (DPI) at 100% of the size of the image is required. For appearance on a computer screen, a resolution of only 72 DPI at 100% is required. Digital printing on an office colour printer, or on a printer designed for commercial volumes of colour prints, can be successful using images of 72 DPI. However, large-run high quality printing using four colour process requires the files to be 300 DPI.
This type of file is an image or graphic file where the DPI is high. These files are required for high quality printing on a non-digital printing press. Greater than 300 DPI at 100% is considered to be high resolution.
This type of file is an image or graphics files where the DPI is low. These files are suited to the internet where the image must load on to a screen quickly. 72 DPI at 100% is considered low resolution. These files are not suitable for high quality printing.
Where a specially shaped indentation is pressed into paper or plastic. This shape might form part of a logo or graphic style for a booklet. De-boss is the opposite; it is where the shape is pressed out.
NCR stands for No Carbon Required and refers to paper which has been treated with a special coating so when paired together in sets of 2 or more sheets the paper reacts to the pressure of a pen so that whatever is written on the first sheet is copied onto the subsequent sheets.
Overprinting means that all the separation colours not used in the foreground colours are transparent, and the background filters through in these areas.
Where a booklet or book is glued and bound with card on the outer cover and a square finish to the spine.
Where a booklet or newspaper is folded and stapled on the side fold.
Where a crease is made in a piece of card or board for the purpose of helping that card or board fold neatly in the same place every time.
A piece of paper that has two folds creating three equal panels. Can be a standard tri-fold, z-fold or gate fold.