1. First Drag and Drop your your images into the Image Gallery in the left menu (above the pink + Add Photos & Graphics button). These are securely stored on our system in the Cloud for future use. You can upload files in JPG, PNG or PDF format. You can upload photos, graphics, clipart and logos.
2. For optimum printing results we recommend:
Photos and bitmapped graphics to be a minimum of 300dpi in sRGB format.
For Logos & Scalable Vectored Graphics containing text or line art, to create a PDF containing scalable Vectored Graphics with Embedded Fonts.
We use the sRGB colour profile for Photos, which our calibrated RIPs convert to CMYK (as all printing presses use CMYK) using the ISOcoated_v2_300_eci.icc colour conversion profile.
Please ensure that artwork is 300dpi. A quick way to check is the file size, if a photo is less than 1Mb it might not print well. A small logo should be ideally over 1Mb but at least 250kB or above in file size.
3. To place an uploaded Photo or Image either:
a) Drag an uploaded image from the Gallery over one of the image boxes on the design, when the Image Box turns Orange release your mouse button.
b) Drag an image from the Gallery into an unused area of the Design Canvas.
c) Add a New Image Box onto your Design Canvas & use step 3a.
If you wish your images to print to the edge of a page please ensure they run over the edge of the Black Page Edge Trim line to the Red Bleed line as we can only trim +/- 1mm. This is Important.
Some Design Canvases will also have a Blue line. This is just a suggested margin safe text area guide to assist you. We advise that text in never closer than 5mm to the edge of a page.
4. Please use the Pink “Save as a Design Project” button at the bottom right of the page early on in your work, this saves your project securely on our system in the Cloud. Once that is done the designer periodically auto saves all your work, so you don’t lose your work, even if your computer, browser or Internet connection crashes.
5. Add Text Boxes by clicking the Add Text Box / A icon.
6. You can add Image/Picture Boxes by using the icon directly to the left of the Add Text Box icon, Add Image Box.
7. To change size click (if the design template allows different sizes) “Size and Paper Options” or Cog icon towards the at the top right of the pasteboard, the price will update automatically with choices so you know the cost.
8. You can preview your design clicking Print Preview / pink Eye icon.
9. If you select an Image Box or Text Box element on a page and COPY - [Control C] (such as a repeating text block or a logo), if you move to another page and PASTE [Control P] it will Paste in Place (so in exactly the same position as it was on the page you copied from).
10. When working with text a popup text control window appears. One useful trick is once you have formatted a text box, if you click the icon bottom right of that pop up window it saves that formatting as your default formatting, so that when you work on different text boxes that text formatting (font/colour/size etc) is automatically used.
11. Images you are placing in your design can appear low resolution. This is by design, the system is very clever, so when you upload a high resolution image it automatically creates a low resolution version for use in the front end, otherwise as an online design package if you were trying for instance to move around a 20Mb image it would be very slow on screen redraws and use up all your bandwidth. So like in InDesign on which the system is loosely based it links the high resolution version (your uploaded image) back end and uses that to create the PDF file for us to print, but uses a low resolution version to make the system fast an efficient.