Design Advice & Tips: Duplicated Discs

The following advice and tips relate specifically to artwork for duplicated discs with digital print packaging. CLICK HERE for advice and tips relating to artwork for pressed discs and litho print packaging.

Digital print: Overview

Digital print paper parts, such as Booklets, Backliner Inlays and ‘Amaray’ Wraps, are printed on large format sheets of paper via our industrial grade high-resolution laser printers using a CMYK toner process. Our ‘Precision Laminate’ on-disc print system is also a digital print process, but using large sheets of very thin plastic material. There is, of course, no intermediate reprographic stage of making films and plates. You send us your pre-press PDF files, and we drop them onto our special output templates for printing. These are sent to the digital printer via Corel Draw or InDesign from our PC or Mac workstations. The large sheets are then cut to size and finished.

Supplying your own press-ready PDF files

This is what we need…

  • Press-ready PDF/X-1a compliant files, on our templates, and conforming exactly to our dimensions and specifications.

...so the first thing to do is Click here to go to get CD & DVD Artwork Templates.

You'll find templates there for the most common types of packaging, but if you're after a packaging format that isn't covered there, then call us and we'll get the correct template for you.

Graphics professionals should be familiar with the concepts involved in working with these templates and specifications, but others may end up having difficulties. If that happens, then it probably means that you shouldn’t be doing it! Not everyone can be an expert in everything, and you may well find it will save time and effort in the long run if you leave it to us. We can accept pretty much any artwork (see "Artwork File Formats" below), although we will have to charge our very reasonable studio rate for knocking it into shape!

Studio rates for creating pre-press PDF files from your artwork

We will add our standard ' PDF Checking' charge to any new job where artwork is involved. This charge covers checking your supplied artwork for compliance to our dimensions and specifications, and making any minor changes required.

PDF Checking charge - £30 plus £5 per page (+VAT)

For example:
4 page CMYK booklet & single-sided backliner - £55
6 page CMYK booklet & double-sided backliner - £70

Additional work not covered under the 'PDF Checking' charge is charged at £50 per hour (£25 min +VAT). Typical operations are adding bleed where bleed has been omitted, adding a barcode graphic (see the 'Barcodes' paragraph below), converting disc label colours to Pantone, etc

If you are supplying artwork so that we can create the PDFs for you, please ensure that your artwork is supplied in one of the file formats listed below in the section, ‘Artwork file formats’.

The PDF checking charge: How it works
We will check any supplied press-ready PDF files for PDF/X-1a compliance and conformity to our other dimensions and specifications. As part of the charge we will undertake to fix any minor problems that we find. Graphics professionals who are confident that they can supply compliant files can choose to opt out of the PDF checking charge. However, if we find problems with the artwork, we will charge the full studio rate of £75 per hour (+VAT) if you then need us to sort it out.

Designing artwork for duplicated discs with digital print packaging: General notes

Colours:
Make sure all colour elements (images, vector graphics, text etc.) within your artwork have their colour defined in CMYK colour (not RGB, LAB, indexed etc.). Black and white elements may be defined as greyscale. Black text should be specifically defined as Black (beware of text imported from other applications, which can occasionally can come in as RGB black).

Bitmaps: Colours
All colour bitmaps MUST be saved in a CMYK format (not RGB or Indexed colour). Black and white images must be saved in Greyscale format if they are to be printed on a black and white page (though there is some advantage to making them CMYK, but ONLY if they are going to appear on a colour page. The printed image ends up looking smoother, but the risk is that a small imbalance in the inks may leave the image with a coloured tinge).

Bitmaps: Size and Resolution
All bitmaps should be imported to DTP packages at the correct size that they will be printed at, ideally at a resolution of 400dpi, and not resized in page layout program. 300dpi will produce acceptable results if disk space is a problem.

Fonts:
You must include all of the fonts used in your artwork, especially if they are at all unusual. Charges will be made if we have to buy fonts that we cannot substitute with our stock fonts in order to get a job to run, and for any time taken to make any text changes.

When designing embedded items containing text, such as fancy titles or logos, try to convert all text to curves or outlines wherever possible. This avoids problems if we don't have the fonts you're using, and will keep all of the formatting exactly as you've designed it. Don't forget to save it as a new file and keep your original version in case you need to edit it in future.

Bleed:
Where the inlay, booklet or label design includes some feature (e.g. a picture or line or box) that comes up to the outer edge, you must make sure that the image “bleeds” over the edge by about 3mm - even on CD/DVD disc label designs! Likewise, if there is a rectangular image that bleeds off the side of a disc label design, you don't even have to trim it down to a circle, as our template will mask off any excess. Also, do NOT knock out the centre hole of a label design as we need it to bleed into the hole.

Printers’ Spreads:
Printers’ spreads is the pairing of 2-pages together in the way that they are printed - not the way they are seen. Currently, we can’t supply multi-page stapled CD or DVD Booklets in short-run digital print quantities, so a 4-page booklet is the standard (although we can also print 6-page folded booklets if required). So when supplying artwork for booklets it is vital that the pages that are printed together are paired together. For example – printers’ spreads for a 4-page booklet…

8 Page Printer's Spreads

Barcodes:
Sounds Good can supply a UPC-A barcode from our own series for a customer to use on their packaging, subject to an administration charge of £25 + VAT (or free of charge if included as part of one of our Musicians’ Deals). This charge does not cover actually creating the barcode graphic or inserting it into the customer’s artwork. Any barcodes allocated by Sounds Good can ONLY be used on product that Sounds Good is manufacturing. The following wording MUST be included in the artwork adjacent to the barcode:

Manufactured in the EU by Sounds Good Ltd.

Whether the barcode is one of ours, or one from the customer’s own series, our artwork pricing is based on the assumption that if a customer wants a barcode on their packaging, then the barcode will be included in any artwork that the customer supplies. We will make a small charge for creating the barcode graphic and emailing it to the customer so that they can include it in their artwork, or for adding the barcode onto artwork already supplied.

Colour Matching:
Because laser printing is a CMYK toner process, colour matching is never going to be as accurate as with litho printing. For that reason, we cannot guarantee exact matches, particularly of any special 'corporate' colours that are usually printed using Pantone spot colour process. It’s a good idea to supply a printout with your files to give us an idea of what the artwork looks like, but don’t assume that the finished product will look exactly the same (see paragraph below, “The perils of home inkjet printouts”). Metallic colours are simply not possible with digital print.

Artwork file formats:
Please email or phone if you need information on anything not covered here.

  • MAC - Quark Express (up to V6); Photoshop (up to CS2); InDesign (up to CS2); Illustrator (up to CS2)
  • PC - Quark Express (up to V4); Photoshop (up to V8/CS); InDesign (up to V3/CS); Corel Draw (up to V11); Illustrator (up to CS); Publisher (V2002) (but read the paragraph below, "The pitfalls of domestic page-layout programs")

Media formats:
Files can be sent to us on CD-R or DVD-R disc, Iomega ZIP 100 or 250 disc. Files of less than 10MB can be e-mailed (phone us for the email address of your designer). Please make sure all discs sent are clearly marked, and try to include printouts of all files as a guide to the contents of the files.

Avoiding potential problems

Print showing through large white areas on the cover:
When printing on our standard 135gsm paper, it is sometimes possible to see what is printed on the other side of the page in large unprinted white areas. If your cover design, for instance, contains large white areas, and you want to avoid any risk of page 2 showing through, you can either not print anything on page 2 or get us to quote for a thicker paper stock, which is a little more expensive.

The perils of home inkjet printouts:
Your home Photo Quality Inkjet printer may produce lovely bright vibrant colours from your artwork when using Premium Glossy paper. Do NOT assume that it will look like that when run to film and printed on a litho offset press! Our digital printer is a professional Postscript device, which is regularly calibrated. If your artwork doesn't look right, then it's probably your artwork that's at fault, not our printer! See our Brief Guide To Colour Printing for further information.

The pitfalls of domestic page-layout programs:
Microsoft Publisher is an excellent program for home users to design and print their own documents. However, although we can take Publisher files, there are issues involved with using Publisher for professional applications. The same applies to Word, which is a great word-processor, but not a design and layout program. It is often troublesome for us to use artwork created by these programs, and in most cases we have to spend time, and consequently charge for this time, in sorting out problems.

Likewise, simple label and inlay creation utilities, such as those provided with CD labelling kits or with Nero or Roxio disc burning packages, allow home users to create artworks for printing out on domestic printers. But they are not meant for creating files for professional print, and we can’t do anything with files made from these utilities.

Brief guide to colour printing

Overview: RGB vs CMYK
Most colour printed paper parts are printed in four-colour process, also known as CMYK, whereby any colours are made up of various densities of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and blacK (in combination with the white of the paper). The human eye contains three types of colour detecting cone, which are sensitive to red, green or blue light. In combination with each other they make up all of the colours that we can see, white for instance, is made up of all three, whereas yellow is made up of just Red and Green light.

Televisions and computer monitors use this to display colours, which is why if you hold a magnifying glass up to one you can see small dots of red, green and blue light. This is also how scanners turn what it sees into something a computer can understand, by sectioning the scanned area into a grid, for which each segment has a value for how much red, green and blue light is reflected. Once inside the computer it is known as RGB colour (short for Red, Green and Blue).

Printed paper parts are different however, as they don't produce their own light, and instead have to work with white light reflected off them. As a result of this the inverse colours of red, green and blue (which are cyan, magenta and yellow respectively), have to be used in combination with the white paper they are printed onto. For instance white light reflected off a solid area of yellow will have all of its blue component removed, resulting in yellow light being reflected off.

In theory, if solid cyan, magenta and yellow were printed on top of each other, no light would be reflected, resulting in a black area. In practice however it doesn't, and looks like a brownish dark grey. To overcome this a black ink is added making up the four colours of four-colour process, a.k.a. CMYK (for fairly obvious reason, though whether the K stands for Key, or is just the last letter of black because blue already got the B is debatable).

To take a picture from a photo, for instance, and make it into the front cover of your CD, it must first be scanned, which will result in an RGB file on the computer. This file must then be converted into CMYK colour, usually in an image manipulation package (e.g. Photoshop). This CMYK file would then be placed, along with any text and other graphics, into a page-layout or graphics program. From this program the job would be turned into a press ready, high resolution PDF file for us to print on our digital printers.

Calibration and colour-matching
There are unfortunately limitations to both RGB and CMYK colour, which should be taken into consideration when using either. An RGB monitor cannot, amongst other things, display a pure cyan. Even worse for computer-based graphic designers, CMYK colour can't produce nearly as many different colours as RGB; vibrant blues for instance are right out. On top of all this there is the sad fact that unless you have a very expensive self-adjusting monitor, or you are a master of monitor calibration, the colours you see on screen when designing an artwork may very well not be the colours that will appear when the job is printed.

Also, you should beware of assuming that what comes out of your home desktop bubble-jet is what it will look like when printed. Home printers were never designed to produce proofs for artworks, and are not postscript compatible (postscript being the language in which a computer tells a professional plate-making machine or digital printer how everything should be laid out, and what colour it should be). Also they tend to contain all sorts of colour correction and enhancement features which make it easy to create an artwork file which will look beautiful when printed on your colour ink-jet printer, but may end up looking dull and lifeless when printed.

So how does anyone ever get their artworks looking how they want? Sounds Good's reprographics department will send you a printout of your artwork, which should be, to all intents and purposes, the same as the final product. If it doesn’t look like how you want it, then the likelihood is that the files themselves will have to be tweaked, either by yourself or by us at extra charge.

Design Advice & Tips relating to Pressed Dics...
...with litho printed packaging and litho or screen-print on-disc print.