What file types do you accept?

To help as many people as possible, KLOP accepts a range of different formats. These are: GIF, PNG, JPEG, PDF.

These are the formats we would recommend:

  • For photography: high resolution JPEGs (preferably un-compressed)
  • For Graphics or Text: print-ready, vector based PDFs
  • For a mix of graphics and photography: print-ready PDFs

What are bleed, trim and safe area?

Bleed – This is the portion of your design that will be trimmed off when the card is cut to the final size. Its purpose is to make sure your design or image reaches right to the very edge of the cards, leaving no unsightly white edges. If you’re designing cards before you upload, you’ll need to make your artwork ‘Full Bleed’ size to account for this. You’ll find a list of ‘Full Bleed’ recommended sizes here, or we have a range of templates available for every product.

Trim – This is the final size of your cards, after the ‘bleed’ has been cut off.

Safe area – This is an area inside the ‘Trim’. Being smaller than your final card, the safe area is kept well away from blades and cutting machines, and so this is where you should place your most important information or sections of your design. Anything outside of this area runs a risk of being cut off!

What is the difference between vector and bitmap images?

A bitmap (e.g. JPEG, PNG, GIF) is made up of a thousands of tiny squares or ‘pixels’. These pixels are all the same size, but can be in a huge range of colours. The amount of pixels shown in an image is called ‘resolution’. When there are lots of pixels and an image looks smooth or photographic, that’s ‘high resolution’. When there are less pixels an image might look blocky or ‘pixellated’.

Due to the fact that there are a set number of pixels in a bitmap image, they don’t hold up well when zoomed in or enlarged. (You can test this yourself, by zooming right into one of your own images on screen, it will look blocky the more you zoom in and less pixels are available.)

For this reason, we ask for ‘high resolution JPEGS’ – these have a large number of pixels available and will look smoother when printed.

A vector image is more sophisticated: it uses X and Y coordinates to plot each point on a line or curve. This means that vector images are scalable and can be enlarged to billboard size while maintaining smooth edges.

Where possible, we recommend saving graphic designs, text and line art as ‘vector based’ PDFs. This is possible in applications like Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign and more recent version of Adobe Photoshop.