Artwork instructions

You should submit all design files primarily as a vectorized PDF file. The vector format means that the size of the design can be modified or enlarged indefinitely without compromising quality. For example, logos are almost always in vector format, while photographs are not.
If your design includes photos, try to ensure they are large enough. The minimum resolution for most products is 300dpi. If you are unsure about the adequacy of the image, please get in touch with our customer service.

Depending on the printing method, Pantone® inks, CMYK process inks, or, in some cases, colored transfer foil, for example, can be used for printing. When you submit printed material to us, always check the standard used for the product's printing inks and try to provide your artwork in an appropriate format.
If your material is in a different color format than the print, we can do the conversion for you, but most often, there are different degrees of transformation, and the result may not be what you want.
We do not take any responsibility for color changes made on behalf of the customer. Therefore, always try to provide your material and the required color profile for the product.

The table below indicates the file formats for the different print media. We primarily ask for the delivery of printed material in three-star file formats, and other file formats might also be valid. Still, as a customer, you accept responsibility for any errors in inaccuracy and color related to the less than ideal file types.

File	Program/software	Note	Suitable
pdf	Illustrator	Convert text to paths	★ ★ ★
eps	Illustrator Photoshop	Convert text to paths	★ ★ ★
ai	Illustrator	Convert text to paths	★ ★ ★
tiff/psd	Photoshop	Minimum resolution 300dpi	★ ★
jpg	Photoshop Other	Minimum resolution 300dpi	★
png		Minimum resolution 300dpi	★

For individually personalized products, please provide a list of names as an Excel file with the names separated into separate cells, one person per line. In addition, if the design includes a company, title, or other identifiable information, add them to their cells on the same line.

If you create the design yourself, please provide us with only one example design file in which the name and other personalized information are in the correct position. The personalization is done during the printing stage in our production; do not submit ready-made, individually personalized files for us.

Name	Title	Company
Mike Dawson	Team Leader	Gaming Company Llc
Annie Creek	Team Manager	Event Center Inc

We always recommend ordering blank conference badges with personalized badges to allow last-minute changes.

When ordering personalized event badges, below are indicative time limits for the delivery of materials. When possible, please supply the design one to two weeks in advance, even before the delivery of the list of attendees. Please submit the lists of participants in Excel format no later than the times shown below.

Size	Qty	Production time
2.9"x4"	Up to 500	3-4 working days
	Up to 1000	4-5 working days
	Over 1000	5-6 working days
4"x6"	Up to 500	4-5 working days
	Up to 1000	5-6 working days
	Over 1000	6-7 working days

We always recommend ordering blank conference badges with personalized badges to allow last-minute changes.

Remember that color matching can never be perfect when ordering sublimation printed products with color matching close to the desired Pantone® color. Sublimation printing is a four-color printing process; Pantone® is a single color. Sublimation printing can simulate a Pantone® color, but exact reproduction of the color is technically impossible.

With a re-order, there may be slight differences in shades from the previous order because the prevailing humidity and current temperature will also affect the printing result.

You can find product-specific design instructions directly on the product page. Go to Artwork Instructions, located right beneath the price list on any product page. There you can download the design files in a PDF file format. Contact our sales for instructions if no files are available on a particular product. Some products require our expertise to do the print file layout. In these cases, we will instruct you to supply the logo files and other design elements directly to our graphic design team.

You can email the file to our sales if your graphic files are small, less than 5 megabytes. You can upload large files via www.wetransfer.com.

Do not password protect the file when submitting printed material in PDF format. Convert text to paths ("Convert to path"), Include images ("Embed"), and do not add crop marks or color calibration bars to your file.

In most of our products, the location of the print is demonstrated in the material instructions. When printing is done on a fabric, the material creates its own challenges to image positioning, as textiles are usually flexible and vary in size. In the case of a product where we cannot precisely align the print within normal production, the location of the design varies.

As a general rule, we recommend that you design the print so that it does not have lines that follow the outer edge, revealing small displacements. In an industrial-scale production, it is not possible, let alone cost-effective, to spend unreasonable time on product positioning during the printing phase.

If the design you are designing requires exceptional precision in the positioning of the image, make it clear already at the ordering stage and discuss with our sales team whether it is possible to print with the desired precision or positioning. Exceptionally accurate positioning may prolong production or require more manual work than usual, which may also reflect the product's price.

When making 3D products, submit your material as comprehensively as possible so that the 3D shapes are correctly displayed. Even a two-dimensional vectorized file is often sufficient if it is easy to determine the three-dimensional points and their height or shape.

If the three-dimensional qualities of the product require curved shapes and demanding piercings, it is advisable to supply the material as a 3D drawing. Contact our sales and ask about the suitability of your file. Three-dimensional shapes are most often used in the manufacture of lapel pins as well as soft PVC badges. Go to www.pins24.com for more information on lapel pins.

A product stamped or contour cut into shape usually requires vector files with a separately marked cut shape. You can implement the cut lines directly into your print material if they are easily separable from the print or submit a separate file for printing and another for the cutting.

Stamping or cutting is often used to make metal pins, event badges, soft reflectors, and mouse pads in custom shapes.

Ordering a print does not always require the customer's own printed material. We can quickly help you with the printing. If you want to add a logo to a product, get in touch and say you want the product with a logo or text. Submit the logo to us, and we will produce electronic proof of the product before production.

Please note that proofing is free only for binding orders. We do not create digital proofs of products without a confirmed order.

We provide digital proof for almost all printable products before moving on to print production. Electronic proofing happens in our Digital Proofing Service, where you can see an electronic preview of the finished product.

The proofing aims to illustrate the location, the size, and the approximate colors of the print. Since it is computer screen proof, and each screen displays colors slightly differently in different shades, the proof does not attempt to depict the final printed color.

Design changes are expected and are part of why products are proofed digitally before production. There may be a need to change the size, position, or color of the printout through an electronic proof. Errors in the content are also often found through electronic proofing.

If there are any changes to the design, please let us know and reject the proof you received. You will receive a new, corrected version for re-approval.

Usually, changes to the drafts are allowed one to two times without charge, after which we treat additional changes as graphic design. A fee may be added depending on the complexity of the design work and the order quantity.

Printing an actual, physical product one at a time as a test print is just as expensive and time-consuming as the final production. Physical proofing is, therefore, not made to illustrate the design - except in exceptional cases.

If the final printing of the product is critical, you can also ask our sales for a quote to get a physical sample. A custom sample will be charged as an individual order, so the price of the physical piece may be high.

However, this is a viable option when, for example, brand coloring is essential, the final batch of printing is large, and the complete success of the printing is paramount. The physical sample ensures a successful result, but its production time is always added over the standard production time, in which case the production of the sample may not be an option if sufficient production time is unavailable.

We will provide free digital proofing for orders before proceeding with printing. Proofing is free when you place a binding order for printing. Free proofing does not include a physical sample. The free proof is also limited to a maximum of two modifications, after which additional modifications may be subject to a different design fee. Try to provide all requests to the draft in the first round of changes.

CMYK + or Beyond CMYK by Xerox® - The latest launch of the world's leading digital printing system supplier in 2022 is now available from us!

CMYK + is a range of amazing unique colors that make printed products more vivid and provide more depth. We offer a full range of special colors, with gold and silver as metallic colors, digital spot varnish, stunning neon colors in cyan, magenta, and yellow, and the most important development in digital printing: White.

The stunning colors are only available for the Xerox® Iridesse®, iGen® 5, and Versant® 180 digital printing systems, leaving other printing press manufacturers far behind.

You can take advantage of these printing methods when ordering anything from us, printed on paper, from event passes to product cards, from attendance and invitation cards to business cards.

Finally, a high-quality printing method is also available if you want to use unbleached brown kraft paper stock, colored card stock from black to magenta, or other surprising implementations for paper and board.

See more on our dedicated page Beyond CMYK by Xerox^®

In sublimation printing, the design is first printed digitally with large format printers on transfer paper. The printed image is transferred from the paper by heat pressing to the product, whereby the inks evaporate and adhere from the transfer paper to the product.

Due to the high temperature and the requirement for evaporation, the sublimation printing ink is highly resistant to abrasion and does not fade in washing, for example.

Sublimation-printed products are pressed individually or from a roll, with the products placed in the printing machine in large quantities.

For example, mouse pads, tube scarves, and microfiber cloths are printed from a roll. The sublimation-printed lanyard is also printed in continuous rolls of about 110 yards in length, which are cut to size only after printing.

In screen printing, the image, text, or logo is printed using pre-mixed screen printing inks. In most products, the inks are matched to the color, according to the Pantone® Coated color chart. If there are multiple colors in the design, our printers will also mix several different matching colors, one for each color in the design.

Screen printing cannot reproduce gradient colors without using process colors or rasterized images. If your design has gradients, choose CMYK printing.

CMYK printing is always full-color printing, where a combination of four colors produces the desired print. We use CMYK printing as sublimation, UV, and DTF printing, for example. UV printing is used to make name badges and plastic products, and DTF printing is used to print for textiles.

CMYK process cannot match Pantone^® colors using the four-color printing. Printing can be carried out close to the desired tone. Perfect matching is not technically possible.

UV printing is often used for printing on hard surfaces. We print plastic, metal, wood, and cardboard with UV inks. The abbreviation UV does not mean glowing colors in black light. Instead, it stands for how the printing is cured with LED UV light during the printing process. Products printed with UV inks are immediately ready for further processing, and the print has excellent durability.

UV printing is used to make name badges and other personalized products, large wall signs, Roll-Up advertising stands, and many of our promotional products.

We use Mimaki UV printing machines exclusively and inks that are Greenguard certified for UV printing. The colors have low VOC (Volatile Organic Compounds) emissions which makes working with them safer.

Most of our printing machines are less than three years old, and our latest printing machines are from this year. New technology enables more efficient color use and lower emissions.

Laser engraving has a burnt effect on most products. Depending on the material, the laser can be used to incinerate wood or a lighter or darker imprint on metal. A layer of multilayer plastic can be "peeled off" with a laser to produce a different color.

Laser engraving does not produce colors; your design file may be a monochrome black and white vector file.

Laser cutting makes products from different materials into a custom shape. If you want a custom shape for the product, submit your design files so that the cut contour is on a separate layer or with a spot color clearly indicated in the file.

Pad printing produces Pantone® color-matched prints on products with a curved or uneven surface, such as sports bottles, enamel mugs, and thermos flasks. In pad printing, each color is printed one at a time with a special silicone pad that adapts to the product's shape.

Please submit your printed material as a vector PDF file with Pantone colors.

Enamel lapel pins are dyed with either a paste enamel paint mixed with the desired Pantone® color tone or colored glass selected from the available colors. In creating enameled lapel pins, you can get help from our sales and graphics team in choosing the right colors for your design.

The printing standard for screen-printed lanyards is according to the Pantone® Coated color chart. The base color of the lanyard also follows the Pantone® Coated color chart. The yarn is dyed to the desired shade of Pantone®, before it gets woven into a lanyard material.

Sublimation-printed lanyards are printed in CMYK colors by a sublimation method. The print is first digitally printed on transfer paper, from which it is heat-pressed onto a white lanyard material. Both the base color of the lanyard and the desired text or logos transfer at the same time.

Pantone® matching is never possible in CMYK printing. Pantone® colors can be simulated, and printing can be brought close to the desired shade, but exact matching is impossible due to technical limitations of the selected printing method.

For woven lanyards, only Pantone® Coated color specifications are used to dye the yarns before weaving the lanyard into a product.

You should go to www.pins24.com to download the graphic instructions in PDF file format for each individual size.

Event badges and other name tags printed on paper are printed in CMYK colors, in full color. If you have ordered personalization, submit the attendees' list as an Excel file with the names separated into individual cells, one person per line. If the badges also include, for example, a company, title, or other identifiable information, add them to their own cells on the same line. Separating different information, such as a job title or a company, enables us to position variable data during the printing process into a desired position on a badge.

Please provide us with one sample of the final design, with the names placed as they should be on a finished product. The actual personalization is made during the printing stage in our production; do not supply finished sheets with completed personalization.

Name	Title	Company
Mike Dawson	Team Leader	Gaming Company Llc
Annie Creek	Team Manager	Event Center Inc

We always recommend ordering blank conference badges with personalized badges to allow last-minute changes.

Screen-printed textiles are printed using Pantone® Coated color specifications. The inks are mixed one color at a time into the desired Pantone® shade. Process color printing in CMYK colors can also be done by screen printing.

DTG and DTF printing uses CMYK colors, Pantone® matching is not possible.

Embroidery uses yarn for personalization, in which exact color matching is not possible. The colors are chosen from the yarn manufacturer's color chart as close as possible to the desired shade.

Woven socks are made using yarns of different colors. Logos, patterns, and coloring are created as a combination of colored threads, socks are not printed. As a result, logos, for example, become a much simpler, "pixel-like" grid. When weaving with a thread, you cannot reproduce shapes exactly as they are in a computer screen.

The yarn color options of woven socks are much more limited than the color definition of a print, and we always try to find the color shades as close as possible to the desired result.

The soft reflectors use a special 3M® ScotchLite® reflective film under which the print remains. The purpose of the reflector film is to make the reflector a personal protection product by flickering in the dark, for example, in the direction of car headlights. Because safety is the primary purpose of a personal reflector, printing is secondary to the product's features.

Due to the nature of the reflective film, the print is not visible when viewed perpendicularly. The print is only visible on the sides. The reflective film also blurs and reduces the visibility of the print to some extent. Inks might not reproduce the design perfectly because there is a reflective film on top. These are features of the product. If you are unsure of how a personal safety reflector works, ask for a sample before placing an order.

Very thin hair lines should be avoided when designing a name badge. The minimum printable line thickness on metal or plastic name badges is 0.01" or 0.25mm, anything thinner than that, although feasible, is likely to scratch off quickly in use. We always recommend choosing thicker fonts when printing logos or names so that they do not have too small lines either.

We use the latest technology available in the market in digital printing. The high-tech properties of our printers can achieve incredible, tiniest detail on a printed product. We pride our production in our ability to be explorative, trying new ideas head first without immediately saying no. But trust us when we say you should not do a printed design in a certain way; we have most likely tried it already.