[thechat] business cards?

[Andrew Forsberg]

>>A few questions jump to mind: is the card black and white, or 
>>colour? If colour: will you be going four colour? black + special? 
>>multiple spot colours? Have you imported any images / logos?
>
>It's black and white, one sided - but there is a gray logo on it. I 
>don't know if that's another color or if it's just a shade of black 
>though.
>
>What are the potential gotchas here?

You'll want to make sure in Photoshop that the logo is grayscale and 
300-ish dpi. If you've scaled it at all in Illustrator, then take 
that into account too. If you've done any whacky distortion / 
rotation on the logo, then it's usually best to do that manipulation 
in Photoshop and just drop it into your Illustrator document. 
Illustrator's transformations are postscript based, which is fine, 
but Photoshop does a better job of manipulating pixels. You'll want a 
TIFF or Photoshop EPS format logo too, they're non-lossy.

Also, check in Illustrator that the logo's fill is black -- the same 
black as everything in the document. Oh, and 'registration' isn't 
black, and it won't print :). It can be kinda funny to see someone's 
face the first time they encounter that one.

If you're just sending them an Illustrator document not layed up you 
should set the document size to the size of the business card you 
want to print. If you want anything like a border or a black / gray 
background then you'll need to extend the fill beyond the edge of the 
page (bleed).

Finally, it's nice to include a laser print of the document, with 
registration marks, trim marks, and bleed, with the file when you 
send it to the printer. If you're sending it electronically then send 
a pdf of it too. You should be able to find all the registration / 
trim options in the page setup / print options off the file menu.

Best of luck,
Andrew

-- 
Andrew Forsberg
---
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