Answers Before You Ask

Guide 1: Bleed, Trim, and Safe Zone

If your design touches the edge of the page, it needs bleed: extend your background 0.125" past the final size on every side. Paper shifts a hair during cutting, and bleed is what keeps a white sliver from showing up on your edge. Meanwhile, keep text and logos at least 0.125" inside the trim line — that's the safe zone. Design touching the edge: bleed out. Design you can't afford to lose: safe zone in.

Exporting from Canva? Use "PDF Print" and check "crop marks and bleeds".

Speaking of Canva…

Build your design at the actual size you're printing. Canva defaults to social media and letter sizes, and a design built at the wrong dimensions can't just be stretched to fit.

Two things go wrong when the size is off:

Pixelation. If you build your 2' x 4' sign as a 2" x 4" Canva design, we'd have to enlarge it twelve times over, and any photos or graphics in it will come out blurry and blocky. Text and shapes survive scaling better than images do, but why gamble? Set the custom size to 24" x 48" from the start and everything exports at full quality.

Wrong proportions. A design built at 8.5" x 11" does not fit an 18" x 24" poster — the shapes of those pages are different, so fitting one to the other means stretching your design or cropping the edges off. Before you start designing, check that your canvas dimensions match your print dimensions, or are an exact proportional match: 12" x 24" scales cleanly to 2' x 4', because it's the same shape, just smaller.

Designing something huge? Canva caps design dimensions, so a 3' x 8' banner won't fit at full size. No problem: build it at exactly half scale (18" x 48") and tell us it's half scale when you send it. We'll scale it up cleanly on our end. Just keep any photos in the design as high-resolution as you can, since they're the ceiling.

One more Canva habit worth breaking: don't design right to the edge without bleed (see above), and don't trust Canva's default download button. "PDF Print" with crop marks and bleeds checked, every time.

Guide 2: RGB vs. CMYK

Screens make color with light (RGB). Presses make color with ink (CMYK). Some colors that glow on your monitor — electric blues, neon greens, hot oranges — physically cannot be mixed from ink, so files built in RGB shift when converted. Design in CMYK from the start when you can. If you can't, expect vivid colors to land slightly more muted, and if an exact color matters (logos especially), tell us the Pantone or CMYK values and we'll match to numbers, not to your screen.

Guide 3: Resolution

300 DPI at final print size is the standard. The image that looks great on Instagram is usually 72 DPI — fine at phone size, fuzzy at poster size. You can't add resolution after the fact; enlarging a small image just makes big blur. Rule of thumb: if you zoom to 100% at print size and it looks soft on screen, it will look soft on paper. Wide-format is more forgiving (a banner read from 30 feet can run 100–150 DPI), and we'll flag it if your file won't hold up.

Guide 4: Vector vs. Raster (and the AI art warning)

Logos, text, and anything cut from vinyl should be vector (AI, EPS, SVG, or a PDF with live vector art) — vectors scale from business card to building without losing an edge. Photos are raster and that's fine. The new gotcha: AI image generators produce raster images that look like logos but aren't vector, and they can't be cut or scaled cleanly. If your logo came from an AI tool, we'll likely need to redraw it as vector first — a service we offer, just build it into the timeline.

Guide 5: Sending Your Files

PDF is king: fonts embedded or outlined, images at full resolution, bleed included, single file per product. Upload with your order, attach to the quote form, or email printworks@printworksindy.com with your order number in the subject. Files over 25MB? Ask us for an upload link. And every file gets human preflight before it prints — if something's off, we call you before it hits a press, not after.