In this article we’ve outlined some helpful tips and best practices to ensure your designs are primed and ready to handover to our pre-press design team. Avoid any hiccups or delays by ensuring your design files are exported correctly.
Sending designs from the Adobe Creative Suite
Ensure all text is outlined
Why is this important?
When saving design files that include text, the appearance of the text will change if an editing program, like Adobe Creative Cloud, doesn’t have the same fonts installed on the computer being used.
To workaround this, there are generally two solutions:
– Upload your font files (OTF/TTF) along with the design file (so the font can be used by our team)
– Convert the text into shapes (outlined) before saving and sharing your design file.
How to outline text in Adobe Illustrator
With your design open in Illustrator, select the text that you’d like to outline:
To outline the selected text, right click while having the Selection Tool selected and press ‘Create Outlines’
Afterwards, your text will be converted into shapes meaning it won’t change in appearance when shared across devices.
How to outline text in Adobe Photoshop
With your design open in Photoshop, select the text that you’d like to outline:
Then from the Layers Tab, right click the selected Text Layer and press ‘Convert to Shape’.
Afterwards, your text will be converted into shapes meaning it won’t change in appearance when shared across devices.
Ensure you package save your design file
After you’ve finished your design and you’re ready to upload and order with noissue, rather than ‘Save’ your design, it’s best to ‘Package’ your design instead. Packaging a design file not only saves the finalized design, but importantly also saves any linked assets like images and fonts that the design may be using. Both Illustrator and Photoshop make this process really simple.
For Adobe Illustrator, with your design open, go to ‘File > Package’. This will open the window below:
From here, select where you’d like to save the packaged folder and leave all the boxes checked. After pressing the ‘Package’ button, a copy of the AI File, along with any linked assets like images and fonts will be collated and saved together in one folder.
The best way to send this packaged folder is to right click and ‘compress’ into a .zip file. Upload the .zip file into your noissue order which will ensure we have all the resources we need to set up your order properly.
For Photoshop users, follow the same instructions, ‘File > Package’, but depending on how the layers in your design are set up, it may not include everything in the folder (like fonts and embedded images in the design) but is regardless still the most ideal way to send files to us.
Sending designs from Canva
Ensure you save your Canva design as a PDF
On the editor page for your design, select the button on the upper right that says ‘Share’.
After clicking the ‘Share’ button a menu will drop down. Click on the ‘Download’ button next.
By default the file type will be selected as PNG, so we have to set it to PDF Print to make sure that we download the correct file. The 3 boxes under the file type can stay unchecked.
If your file has multiple pages, you can select to include particular pages or select the option for all pages, then press the ‘Download’ button. Locate your downloaded PDF and share/upload to noissue.
Note: If you’re subscribed to Canva Premium, set the Color Profile to CMYK for a more accurate color print, otherwise, if you’re not subscribed, download in RGB and we’ll convert it for you.
