Learn how to prepare your Freepik files and resources for printing

Okay! So you just found the ultimate icon or vector from Freepik or Flaticon, created a cool pattern, an amazing poster or a beautiful postcard and you want to get them ready for printing, whether it’s at your own home or at a print shop.

If you are printing the files at home, first of all you have to make sure that your printer and screen colors are going to match. For this, callibration is crucial (and we talked about how important this was for any designer or illustration on another post here in the blog!). Even if you have the most expensive printer in the market, if callibration isn’t accurate, the final printed work won’t make any justice to the colors that you worked so hard to choose.

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Some recommend that the ideal printing format would be to convert your RGB files to CMYK, so that the colors stay the same during printing. Also, a 16 bit file will be printed in better quality than a 8 bit, so check your settings before hitting the print button to save some ink! Despite that, one of the advantages of being able to print your work at home is that you can experiment and try different settings to find the ones that suit your tastes the best!

Nevertheless, sometimes you will need to take your files to print them outside of your home. If you don’t have a printer large enough to produce a full size poster, or if you want to print your vector icon patterns on fabric to make a pillow case or a tote bag, you will have to take the files to a print shop or a specialized store. Before anything, make sure to ask that the project that you have in mind is possible: not every shop uses the same canvas bags or fabrics for printing, and if you can, ask for samples or ask to see previously finished works (which many shops have available for showing to the clients).

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In this case, every print shop has their own recommendations for clients that bring their own files for printing. But most of them will agree on these:

  • You have to leave at least 3 mm of bleed space on all edges, because you don’t want to lose any important detail from your design in the borders when they are cut!
  • The PDF format is a great format to take to the print shop because it will guarantee that your work will be printed as is, but if you want to bring another format, you should make sure that you include the fonts used in the folder so that they can be printed too!
  • The images should have a resolution of at least 200-400 dpi, so make sure that you have the right settings!
  • If you can, include a low-res version of the project in PDF so that the print shop can check that everything in the picture was correctly printed.

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Hopefully these tips will help you achieve better printing results, whether it’s at home or at the print shop. Enjoy creating amazing graphics and customizing posters, stickers, buttons and apparel with the awesome vector resources that you will find on Freepik and Flaticon!