What to take into account at the time of building a custom 4x6 template design file

At the time of creating a new image, with the intention of using it as a base template file for a future design, there are many factors that has to be taken into account, no matter what design software you are using, these are general rules that every designer or person creating a design for a 4x6 club flyer, should follow.

Size: If you are interested in the 4x6 (inch) which has become the standard size for the club flyers these days, you should create the file not just 4 inch by 6 inch, because you are not leaving the bleed area (space of the design outside of the cutting edge to give the cutter a range of margin and avoid tiny white lines at the time of cutting) as supposed, so you add an additional 0.25” to the width and height, giving you a total of 4.25”x6.25”.

Quality: Depending on the software you are using, you might get asked about the resolution of the image, this is also called DPI, and here we will set this up to 350 pixels DPI resolution for best quality. You will notice files are going to be heavier with this resolution, but as well will contain better details and quality.

Color settings: Instead of the so popular RGB, we will recommend you to change it to CMYK which is the color separation technique used by the printers at the time of creating the plates used by the offset machine. The colors will look a bit pale and not as nice as the RGB, but the fidelity will be more accurate to what’s going to be printed instead of just what you are seeing in your desktop screen.

Guidelines: There are a few guidelines that need to be added, like the cutting edge guideline and safe margin zone for text and images, this is usually done dragging reference lines from the rulers into the image area, not all software’s are capable of doing so, and we recommend Photoshop and Illustrator.

Following these easy recommendations you will for sure avoid having your club flyer order delayed or cancelled until further noticed, also avoid possible fees for fixing the art file to a ready-to-print state.