Can Heavy Ink Coverage Cause Chipping?

Coated cards have a thin clay coating that can chip when trimmed. Cards with heavy ink coverage, especially dark colours that goes all the way to the edge, tend to really to show this chipping. We recommend silk laminated cards on cards with heavy coverage at the trim line.

Will Colour Vary?

The upside of club-run printing is the shared savings, the downside is that we adjust colour globally to get the best overall colour for shared jobs. This means the colour of club-run printed items will vary through the run and will not match exactly on re-prints. Our Indigo printing service is better suited to colour critical work.

Can I write on Coated cards?

Coated cards aren't ideal for writing on. If finished with a matte aqueous coating, sharpies may work if left to dry but ballpoint pens will smudge. If finished with a UV gloss coating, don't even think about it. If this is a big deal, check out our uncoated card stock options.

Can Greys Can Shift?

CMYK Process colours in the grey range and de-saturated images can shift in colour throughout the print run and may cause the greys to appear either cooler or warmer. For a neutral grey, we recommend converting all grey values and de-saturated images to true greyscale consisting of K (black) only values.

Is there colour variation on solid blue?

Due to the nature of club-run printing, you may experience colour variation in solid fills of blue. For great blue results, we recommend a 30% difference between your Cyan and Magenta levels to ensure a nice rich dark blue, rather than purple.

Should You Use Rich Black?

For the richest of deep dark blacks in print use 50/40/40/100 as the CMYK value. If printing small black text (or knocked out text) we recommend a k only black (0/0/0/100) to avoid misregistration issues.

Can UV Coating Change Colours On The Cards?

Colour on cards finished with a UV gloss coating will appear slightly darker and richer than cards finished with an aqueous coating.

Technical Specifications + Templates

Bleeds: all files must have a 1/8" bleed on each side
Live Area: keep all critical text and artwork 1/8" inside the trim
Colours: supply your files in CMYK colour (Pantone/RGB colours will be converted or rejected)
Resolution: 300 dpi minimum (400 dpi preferred)
Fonts: fonts must converted to curves/outlines (we do not accept fonts).
Transparencies: flatten all transparencies
Types Of Files We Accept: MAC & PC files from Photoshop (PSD), Illustrator (EPS or AI), CorelDraw (CDR or EPS), Adobe Acrobat PDF, TIFF or JPEG.

Print Specifications

Offset Printed Using Stochastic Screens
(100 and 250 quantities are digitally printed)
16pt Coated Card Stock, 30% post-consumer waste (130lb)
Full Colour Both Sides (4/4) or Full Colour One Side (4/0), using soy-based inks