Is Your Holiday Mailer Ready to Print: A Designer’s Checklist for Preparing Files for Production

Holiday mailers matter. Whether you’re wishing season's greetings to longtime customers or positioning a special, limited-time offer, holiday mailers are an important touchpoint for brands. In fact, more than 1.6 billion holiday cards are mailed each year. With so many pieces of holiday mail in the pipeline, designers need to plan for holiday mailers many months in advance to help their project stand out amongst the pack. 

An important component of beating the seasonal rush to produce holiday mailers is ensuring your design files are properly prepped for production. Taking the time to prepare design files streamlines the print process to help save time and money, and it helps you identify and troubleshoot potential issues before your mailer goes to print. 
With this in mind, this designer’s checklist will help you better prepare design files for production to ensure a more merry holiday mailing season.

Be sure to provide complete font sets

Providing complete font sets for every single font used in your design — even embedded fonts — is key to ensuring each character in your design is represented on the printed sheet. Some fonts can be loaded as ‘restricted’ and this can result in missing characters in the final printed piece. Making sure all fonts are embedded in the design file before sending your files to the printer can reduce delays in production and decrease the likelihood of print errors. 

Verify image resolution

Image resolution is essentially the amount of detail contained within an image file. Designers need to be cognizant of how much information resides in an image when creating design files with the ideal resolution to produce vibrant print without bogging down the production process. Though the ideal resolution can vary by print device, most commercial print jobs require a dpi of 300 for the highest level of print and image quality, as lower resolutions may result in blurry or pixelated images. 

Make sure your images are in the right file format

Holiday mailers are ideal for interesting and eye-catching images, and making sure your images are saved in the right file format is key for an efficient print process. The two most common file formats are Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) and Tagged Image File Format (TIFF). Each file type has its own compression rates, workflows and ideal applications, though TIFF files may be most appropriate for the high image and print quality required for a holiday mailer. Whatever your file format, ensuring consistency across all images is important for quality and error-free production.

Convert colors to CMYK

Converting design file colors from RGB (red, green and blue) to CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) is critical to ensure the way your design file looks on the screen matches how it looks once it’s applied to the sheet. This conversion will provide you with a better glimpse of how colors will be produced, especially with colors outside the CMYK color gamut, like bright greens and blues.

Check to ensure that updated color information is applied across every proof

Once you’ve converted to CMYK and you’ve completed a soft proof on your monitor and a hard proof on your printed reference chart, make sure to update color information and verify that this update is applied across the entire workflow.

Account for static and variable designs

Prepping files with static designs compared to files with variable designs is not necessarily a 1:1 process. Whereas static elements appear the same on each piece and can be run through the preflight process to detect any issues, variable designs use text and images directed by information from a data source like a CSV file. Communicating with your print provider at the beginning of the design phase about how they process variable data can help avoid production bottlenecks down the line.

Create a PDF prototype and document all settings

A PDF prototype is not a high-resolution, press-ready file, but rather something of an instructional document that helps your printer better understand the visions for your holiday mailer. Documenting all your settings before sending this PDF to your printer helps identify any miscues and troubleshoot any communication issues about your preferred file formats or settings.

Conduct a final QC of your press-ready files

Creating and conducting a quality control (QC) check of your press-ready files helps facilitate a faster, smoother and more efficient production process. Plus, this extra step demonstrates to your printer that you value their time and collaboration by ensuring the files you provide are truly ready for printing.

Some things to consider when conducting a final QC of your press-ready files include clearing out any unused fonts; removing unused colors and reviewing your color library to ensure colors are applied across the file; and removing elements in the gutter such as extra lines, marks or notes from the document’s surrounding area.

While this checklist will help designers prepare their holiday mailer files for production, a high-quality mailer is really only as good as the paper it’s printed on. Accent offers a range of paper options — including our Accent® Opaque premium, uncoated sheet — to help you create holiday mailers that make the season both merry and bright. 

Browse our Project Inspiration gallery to get inspired, or learn more about our paper options.