Leaflet Printing - How to Create a Fantastic Colour Flyer with out design fees

Looking for a best deal all the time is one of the reasons Jame's company has done so well. When he put his mind to printing full colour flyers, its really a surprise that he found a bargain. The budget for the business leaflets was tight this year and he had to find the cheapest flyer printing available without compromising quality.

"After spending about 30min looking for flyer printers and trying to find the best flyer printing deal, I eventually stumbled upon some affordable leaflet printing. I was shocked to see that the design price for the promotional leaflets was going to be 138.00! That wasnt in the leaflets printing budget and we couldnt pay it." Explains James. After looking around a bit he found a few tutorials and blog's on designing your full colour leaflets yourself. He summarised his findings to me as:

Software
He told me, "You need to start by finding a good application to design your flyers printing on. Don't rush this, or else it could cause you a lot of hassle later." The easiest software to use to design your leaflet is desktop publishing software such as Word. This is quick and simple, however most printers require you to provide the artwork for your leaflet in PDF, and you cant save in this format. Photoshop is usually used to design the most impressive flyer printing.

"To design your flyer for printing using Photoshop, set the canvas size to the correct size of the leaflet, plus bleed. The bleed on you leaflet printing is a little excess around the edges of the leaflet, this is so that when the leaflet printing company cuts it out after the printing process they wont chop off any of your design by accident. You usually need around 3mm bleed on a leaflet," says James. Therefore, if you decide to print flyers that are A4 (210x297mm) then you need to add 3mm more around the edges of your design. So the total size will be 216x303mm.

It is important to set the colour scheme of your colour flyers to CMYK, it may be RGB by default. RGB or red, green, blue are the colours used to project the image of your leaflet design on your monitor. CMYK or cyan, magenta, yellow, black, are the actual colours of the ink used in leaflet printing. At first when you change the colour scheme to CMYK, everything will look a little dull. However, when you have your leaflet printed, it will make a difference.

Nearly all the leaflet printing companies ask for you to change the image res to 300dpi for high quality flyer printing. Your leaflet may look good on your computer, but screens can only do 72dpi, when its printed you will be able to see all the pixels on you leaflet.

"When you send your leaflet design to the printers, ask them to send you a proof by email, you can check that the flyer looks correct before its printed. If there are any problems with you leaflet, your leaflet printing company will come back to you and tell you to change the design. Remember that if you don't feel confident enough to design for leaflet printing or flyer printing than you can always ask your printer to do the design for you, but be prepared for a fee!"