To help as many people as possible, Supreme Printers accepts a range of different formats. These are: GIF, PNG, JPEG, PDF. These are the formats we would recommend:

For photography: high resolution JPEGs (preferably un-compressed)

For Graphics or Text: print-ready, vector based PDFs

For a mix of graphics and photography: print-ready PDFs, X-1a to be safe

These sound like technical (even painful) terms, but they're actually quite simple:

Bleed

This is the portion of your design that will be trimmed off when the card is cut to the final size. Its purpose is to make sure your design or image reaches right to the very edge of the cards, leaving no unsightly white edges. If you're designing cards before you upload, you'll need to make your artwork 'Full Bleed' size to account for this. You'll find a list of 'Full Bleed' recommended sizes here, or we have a range of templates available for every product.

Trim

This is the final size of your cards, after the 'bleed' has been cut off.

Safe area

This is an area inside the 'Trim'. Being smaller than your final card, the safe area is kept well away from blades and cutting machines, and so this is where you should place your most important information or sections of your design. Anything outside of this area runs a risk of being cut off! All sounding too complicated? We've put together a dedicated FAQ, which explains the 'bleed', 'trim' and ‘safe area’ more clearly. It also shows common mistakes and how to avoid them.

A bitmap (e.g. JPEG, PNG, GIF) is made up of a thousands of tiny squares or 'pixels'. These pixels are all the same size, but can be in a huge range of colours. The amount of pixels shown in an image is called 'resolution'. When there are lots of pixels and an image looks smooth or photographic, that's 'high resolution'. When there are less pixels an image might look blocky or 'pixellated'.

Due to the fact that there are a set number of pixels in a bitmap image, they don't hold up well when zoomed in or enlarged. (You can test this yourself, by zooming right into one of your own images on screen, it will look blocky the more you zoom in and less pixels are available.)

For this reason, we ask for 'high resolution JPEGS' - these have a large number of pixels available and will look smoother when printed.

A vector image is more sophisticated: it uses X and Y coordinates to plot each point on a line or curve. This means that vector images are scalable and can be enlarged to billboard size while maintaining smooth edges.

Where possible, we recommend saving graphic designs, text and line art as 'vector based' PDFs. This is possible in applications like Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign and more recent version of Adobe Photoshop. You can download templates for each of these applications.

Indoor banners

White

Lightweight, durable, flexible

Smooth matte finish

Fade resistant

Tear resistant

Outdoor Vinyl

White

Durable, flexible

Rough matte finish

Fade resistant

Tear resistant

Wind resistant

Note: Indoor and Outdoor vinyl banners are NOT flame-retardant.

Good question. These terms are thrown around a lot in the printing and graphics world, and it is important to understand the difference.

CMYK

Stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and key (black). Are the colours of ink used during the printing process. More colour means more ink, which results in a darker image. Printed items get brightness from paper; the absence of ink results in white (the common colour of paper). Created by printing coloured dots.

RGB

Stands for Red, Green, and Blue. Are the colours of light used by your monitor to display images on screen. More colour means more light, which results in a lighter image. On-screen items get brightness from lights; the absence of light results in black. Created by displaying coloured pixels. How does this affect me?

Images you create on your computer should be created in CMYK mode.

This will ensure that the colours you see on-screen will most closely match the final printed product. It’s hard to perfectly convert between RGB and CMYK. Bright values produced by your monitor (in RGB) cannot be exactly reproduced in print (CMYK). Note: a lot of digital images are JPEGs and JPEGs are almost always in RGB.

You need to know what you want to design. Sometimes you can get great design done in various simple programme, just remember to save as PDF before sending it to us.