Our Digital Colour press is effectively a large, fast, expensive inkjet printer. It allows us to print short-run newspapers (from 1-300 copies) at an affordable price.
It produces great results, but the colours are often not as deep or rich as our Traditional Colour press.
To design for Digital Colour the specifications are as follows:
- The page size including margins is 289mm × 380mm (spread size 578mm x 380mm)
- Leave a 15mm margin clear around each spread (two pages). It’s okay to print across the middle, just leave out the centre margin.
- Use CMYK, not RGB
- Keep image quality above 150dpi but no larger than 300dpi.
- Keep the file size below 50Mb (ideally below 30Mb) as large files cannot be printed. If the file size is too large try compressing the images to 150dpi.
- Remove all crop marks and bleeds before submitting
- Keep ink coverage below 240%. Using a colour profile helps with this.
- For black and white images use CMYK (set your black to use all four inks, rather than just 100%K black). For text stick to 100%K.
- Submit one PDF with pages rather than spreads
General newspaper design rules also apply
- Colours and shades can vary considerably from page to page or paper to paper. If exact colour reproduction is important a newspaper may not be the best choice.
- Avoid using very small text, fine lines or small text made from different coloured inks as they may blur when printed.
- Avoid large areas of a single colour: there may be some colour variation across a large area.
- Use high contrast images: if in doubt, up the contrast by 15-20%.
For most people, Digital Colour works very well, but if you require the highest quality, then we recommend our Traditional Colour press.
