Small orders allowed; quick turnaround
Written: Mar 22 '07 (Updated Mar 22 '07)
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I happened across overnightprints.com in a search to find a printer for save-the-date magnets. I found that printing out business card–sized announcements and sticking them onto business card–sized magnets (from a different vendor) was more than 50% cheaper than getting true save-the-date magnets. I chose this vendor since it the minimum print order was small (100s vs. 1000s) and allowed me to upload a personally designed card of my choice. I did so before reading many of the negative reviews and was quite pleased with the results.
Overnightprints.com offers both pre-designed cards as well as a method to upload your own design. It accepts many different formats. I designed mine in Adobe® Illustrator® and converted it to a PDF before uploading. The website provides downloadable templates to give the sizes, bleeds, and save zones. I used the one for Illustrator, but have not tried any of the other ones.
Getting something to look on paper as it looks on the screen is no easy task, one that publishers deal with on a daily basis. I was fortunate to have several years of layout and publishing experience at my side. This is not to say that the layperson would not be able to design and upload a card, but the specifics of bleeds, traps, color spaces, blacks vs. rich blacks, and the like are nontrivial matters that can become complicated and are sometimes necessary to reproduce on paper the image on the screen.
The template provided by overnightprints.com clearly delineated the extent of the bleed, the nominal size, and the safe zone. The nominal size is the size the card should be if cutting were perfect. The extent of the bleed and the safe zone delimit the possible areas where the cut may be made. More simply, any elements that are to go to the edge of the card (like colored backgrounds) should extend all the way to the bleed. Any elements that need to be visible in full (such as text) should remain well within the safe area. Most likely, the problems faced by others of text being cut off were due to this problem. The safe zone should be thought of as the edge of the card, not a margin; that is, in designing the card, one should add a margin within the safe zone and not extend any text beyond this true margin. This will prevent text from ending up too close to the edge or even cut off in the event that that the cut line falls close to the safe zone marker.
The bleed and safe zone together are only 1/8”, meaning each cut is accurate within ± 1/16”, which is quite impressive for cards of this size. In the allotment that I received, the cuts were right at the nominal size, with the background extending all the way to the end, and a healthy margin around all text.
Overnightprints.com asks to design the card using CMYK preview mode, but to upload it in the RGB color space. This is most likely because overnight prints converts all uploads to CMYK and rather than convert it twice (once on your side and once on its), asks that everything be sent in RGB. This can become a bit tricky with some programs as the color black is 0—the absence of color—in the RGB space, but can be defined as several different values in CMYK. Black that is 100% K is not as rich as “rich black”, which contains contributions from all channels. For example, overnightprints.com asks for rich blacks to be 60-40-40-100 CMYK. This number is dependent on the inks and paper used since 100-100-100-100 CMYK would theoretically give the darkest black, but often makes the paper too wet, giving unwanted results. This value is important in designing the card, but was actually difficult to find on the website.
My design contained black elements as well as black-to-white gradients. For the latter, I only used the K channel since I didn’t want spots of color within the smooth gradient. For true black areas, I used the rich black suggested. In cases where black text is over a colored background, it’s best to use rich black instead of 100K black as it provides an intrinsic trap. That is, when cards are printed with the different plates for CMYK, if they don’t register exactly, sometimes there is a small amount of white space that appears around 100K black elements. Using a rich black that is composed of all the channels helps get around this.
It’s also important to use a program that won’t change all of the blacks to 0 in RGB, so as to preserve the variations. Adobe Illustrator simply previews the artwork in different color working spaces, but retains the actual color values, so this is probably the best method to use when uploading. Incidentally, I used the “U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2” CMYK working space in Illustrator. This gave me the best preview for color. When I hold up the printed card to the image on my calibrated monitor, the colors are almost exactly the same.
The uploading protocol is very straightforward. Any file less than 12MB can be sent, and overnightprints.com gives an instantaneous JPEG preview. As the website states, this is more for a proof to show any big errors like missing fonts or wrong sizes, and it not at the ultimate resolution. The color on the preview was only fairly accurate, but as I said, the final product was almost exactly as the preview on screen.
I opted for the free UV coating on the printed side. This adds a gloss and partially waterproof coat. There is an option to provide a UV coating mask so that it can only be applied to certain areas; for example, over a photo but not over text. I did not use this option, but it was nice to have available.
I placed my order without using the “expedite” option and chose the cheapest form of delivery. The cards were printed the very next day, and shipped the following day. As they were coming from California to New York, it took about 4 days in transit, but I got them before the estimate that is provided on the website. The cards came in a small cardboard box with a sample taped on the outside. All of the cards are identical in terms of color and size. I was more than pleased with the result.
I should add that overnightprints.com uses many different printers, and I may have lucked out getting a good one while others with negative reviews had another one. Also it’s almost a certainty that two batches of identical card designs printed at two different times (even on the same press) will look slightly different. If accurate color is a major concern, all of the foreseen cards should be printed at once. Additionally, a lot depends on the calibration of the color of the monitor used to design the card. Make sure that it is calibrated at least with respect to brightness and contrast levels before beginning.
I have already recommended this vendor to several colleagues who are also working on save-the-date cards. The cards are thicker than most (16 pt. final) giving them a good feel. The offset printing is excellent, with little visible dithering.
Recommended:
Yes
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About the Author
Location: New York, NY
Reviews written: 14
Trusted by: 1 member
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