For even the busiest, most experienced designers, a roller banner print setup is unusual. Bleed isn’t really needed on the top, left or right. And what’s this big area I need to leave at the bottom for. We get asked questions about setting up a roller banner for print daily. For that reason we have decided to put together this little guide to help you correctly set up the print file for your roller banner.
6 tips to consider when setting a roller banner up for print:
- Size
- Image quality
- CMYK vs RGB
- Bleed and safe area
- Software
- Saving as a pdf
Size of roller banners
At kaizenprint.co.uk we use one size of roller banner as standard: 850mm wide x 2000mm tall. There are smaller and larger banner sizes available however our premium roller banner size would be the most common in the marketplace. Our roller banners have a compact footprint but due to their height they command a great presence when displayed at events or within your business premises.
Image quality for roller banner design
Whenever you are designing a roller banner it is prudent to use the highest quality imagery you have available to you. As a minimum we recommend images have a resolution of 300 dpi when sized at 100% scale on the artboard. This will be shown as effective PPI in Adobe Indesign as an example.
CMYK vs RGB
Similarly to image quality, the colour format graphics are saved in will have a massive impact on the design. Printers, as a rule of thumb print roller banners using CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key, which is Black). While you may design in RGB colour spectrum for web and social media graphics, you must convert to CMYK for print.
When converting imagery from RGB to CMYK you will notice the colours darken somewhat. This is normal due to the number of colours RGB can replicate vs CMYK. To counter this, we recommend you lighten any imagery that was originally RGB and converted to CMYK before saving your final file as a pdf.
Our production team automatically convert all RGB images to CMYK before printing, however to ensure you are happy with the results, we suggest you do this at design stage and account for the colour differentiation.
Bleed and safe area on a roller banner
Roller banners are unique in their design in that they require bleed on only one side. The top, left and right are exempt from requiring bleed. However the bottom unlike normal design for print required 100mm of bleed at the bottom. This extended bleed area allows our production team to affix the banner to the roller banner mechanism without the showing of a white border. Extend any colour or background images to the bottom of the bleed area.
In addition to bleed, the safe area on a roller banner is different somewhat from design of flyers. For example instead of a 3mm safe area all round, we recommend 100mm from the bottom of the roller banner (200mm from the bottom of the bleed) and at lead 50mm from the top, left and right hand sides.
Which software to design a roller banner?
We do not recommend designing a roller banner in photoshop. Photoshop is a bitmap based design programme and designing a roller banner in this will result in huge files that may be unusable or could be low quality and pixelated in print. We suggest using vector based programme such as Indesign and Illustrator.
Saving roller banner artwork as a PDF
When sending a roller banner to print, we always recommend saving as a PDF. The default High Quality settings in any Adobe product are usually perfect for printing. We do recommend changing the PDF Standard to: PDF/X1-a: 2001. This reduces compatibility issues and maximises the chances of error free printing. Saving you both time and money.
If you’re unsure about designing a roller banner, our own roller banner design team are more than happy to take your project onboard. Or if you want our artwork department to review the print-readiness of your design, we’d only be to happy to help.
After that, if you are happy to proceed to print, you can order your roller banners online by visiting this page: https://kaizenprint.co.uk/roll-up-banners/
