Expert Preparation Tips For Rack Cards

By Author: Brent Durell
Total Articles: 172
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If there is one thing I know when it comes to rack cards, it is that you should always submit the perfectly prepared draft for printing. Otherwise, your rack cards will undoubtedly have gross errors in its design and content that might jeopardize its objectives for full on printed marketing. That is why you should always think about preparing your color rack cards properly for full scale printing. Let me help you how to do this expertly with a few professional preparation tips for rack cards.

1. Check the background for the appropriate bleeds - The first thing that you should do to prep your rack card draft is to check the background. For the rack card printing to proceed properly, the draft background must have the appropriate bleeds so that any errors or inaccuracies in printing are compensated for. So the background should extend at least 1/8th of an inch beyond the main borders of the color rack cards. This should help minimize those bad type rack card prints that have backgrounds that are obviously cut badly.

2. Review, proofread and cut down rack ...
... card content - Once the background check is complete; you should also always consider prepping the text content of the rack card for rack card printing. You will want to review and proofread all the content, which includes the text and the images. Are they the most appropriate for your color rack cards? Are they big enough/small enough for your purposes? Are there no spelling errors, grammar errors and design errors? Make sure that everything is perfect, and do all the checks three times just to be sure.

3. Picture resolution checking - You might also want to take a closer look at those pictures and try to be sure that they are in high resolution. If you used images from the Internet for your rack card images, then definitely you will need to replace those. In printing higher resolution images are more appropriate as web images tend to get distorted or have bad pixels. So make sure that you are inserting high resolution images from digital scans, designs or photographs. They must be at 300 dpi or higher to work well.

4. Check margins and formatting - You should also see if the margins and the formatting of text are good for your rack cards. Sometimes, text and other content might actually have a little issue in misalignment that can make the color rack cards look a little awkward and amateurish. That is you should always review the printing margins and manage the text formatting of your rack card content.

5. Test printing - Finally, as a last preparation step, you should test your rack card draft by printing out a sample on your own. By doing some test printings, you can see how large your color rack cards will be and of course, you should be able to spot any more errors that people might have missed looking at the screen. Use this as an opportunity to clean out any remaining errors in your color rack card designs.

Great! After all those steps, your custom rack cards should already be prepared for full scale rack card printing. Remember to try to do all the steps detailed above to make sure that nothing gets missed in your design and printing options. Good luck with your new color rack cards.