Create Artwork
for Custom Cut-Outs

Designing artwork for your prints is always the number one step when it comes to producing your offline marketing materials, especially with cut outs. On this page you will find some of the answers to your questions regarding the terms we use when handling your artwork and designs.

4 min. read

Cuts and Trims

These are lines that are added to your art which are basically the cut lines, also called “CutContour”.

They are the basis for indicating where our machines will be cutting precisely onto your printed artwork. The lines or CutContour will also be a Spot Colour, this helps the machine detect the lines for cutting to create and achiever a finer cut.

Remember to Balance

If you are looking into printing a cut out meant to stand straight for a long period of time, it’s best to ensure that your design and artwork are equally shaped to decrease the chances of your cut outs losing balance and tipping over because of it’s uneven shape.

Always remember to consider how your design can affect the balance and stability of your cut out.

Ask for help

One common mistake for first timers is when they attempt to add a cut line to their artwork using Photoshop.

This is not recommended. If you’re not familiar with this, it’s best to let the professionals handle it to avoid any future errors during printing. 

Adding cut lines is not as easy as it sounds and requires specific attention to detail and colour. It is usually done with Illustrator, InDesign, or Corel. Either way ask us for help, and we’ll be at your service. (for a small fee)

Spot Colour

The colour we use for Spot Colour is one that stands out from your artwork to make sure it is easily visible.

It is often mistaken as part of the artwork when we send through artwork proofs and usually clients are quick to point out how this particular line is not part of the artwork at all.

Which we then happily explain further that the cut line was added for our machine to indicate where to cut precisely. Again, it is not part of the artwork and will not be seen once the prints are cut and ready, because it will be cut completely off.

Art Work File Types

With advancing image technologies, certain variations have been noticed in the way from which we used to see and improve images. PDF format being the main format we require for artwork specifications in order to produce best quality images on the custom prints, other file types such as JPG, JPEG, PNG, PSD etc. are commonly provided however all of these serve different purposes and are not always qualified to be used for certain custom prints due to the quality and resolutions of the image. In short, we prefer Vector images instead of Raster images. Learn more about correct file types.


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