The Redbows Promotional Gifts Blog

You may be surprised to learn that sometimes we come across artwork submitted for a promotional gifts project that does not feature the obvious details you would expect to find on such artwork. When composing the artwork for your next promotional campaign, it really is worth taking a step back, and evaluating whether you really do have all of the necessary details featured somewhere on the design.

For example, we recently were looking to order a particular product for our office, and happened to have a promotional coaster on one of our desks for the company that supplied it. To our shock and horror, we could find no trace of a contact detail anywhere – no telephone number, postal address, email address nor web address to be seen. Whilst it wasn’t too difficult for us to locate the said company in the telephone directory, it would have been much easier and quicker if they had included their contact details on the promotional coaster in the first place.

Do remember that a promotional gift does exactly what it says on the tin…it promotes your company or service/product. Always make sure you feature your company name, telephone number and web address (if you have one) as a way for your client to contact you quickly and easily. Don’t forget that in today’s fast-paced society, many people want things done quickly, and don’t want to have to log on to the internet to search for your company details. In most cases, a written postal address is not necessary, however if you feel this would benefit your organisation it may be worth considering.

If you are unsure as to what you can actually fit onto your design within the set print area for the product, do feel free to either call our Sales Team on 0845 8386 368 (or email sales@redbows.co.uk), or our Design Studio (design@redbows.co.uk), who will be happy to advise you on the best way to include all of the information needed to make your promotion a huge success for your business.

You may have noticed on our website that we offer Virtual Visuals. You may have wondered what on earth these are, and whether they could be of benefit to you. A ‘Virtual Visual’ is a way of seeing your logo (or any other branding) featured on the products you are considering purchasing. Whilst this is not an ‘Artwork Proof’ (which you do receive once your order is processed free of charge), it has been designed to give you an informal illustration of how the end product could look. If you’re not already convinced, here is a list of reasons why it’s best to request a Virtual Visual today:

1) It’s quick. Usually, our Design Studio can supply you with your Virtual Visual within 24 hours, if not within the hour (which is usually the case).

2) It’s simple. All you need to do is tell us which product(s) you are interested in, and forward us your logo. It’s as easy as that! We do request that you send your artwork through in an Illustrator Vector file, but for the purposes of a Virtual Visual we can usually work with most formats.

3) It’s useful if you are working on behalf of a client. We’ve all been there – trying to describe an item to someone that you can see in your mind so clearly, but they just can’t empathise! So if you need to convince (ahem, advise) your client that your idea is a great one, it’s always useful to have something visual that they can review.

4) It’s completely free of charge, with no obligation. We do not charge for our visual samples, nor do we expect you to place an order once you have received it. It is there simply as a visual aid to help your decision-making process a whole lot easier.

5) You’ve got nothing to lose!

If you would like to receive a Virtual Visual sample, email your request plus your artwork to design@redbows.co.uk , where one of our Design Team will generate it for you within 24 hours.

You may notice navigating around our website that many of our products can be ‘foil blocked’ - a particular type of print process. Rather than ink being applied to the surface of the product, a metallic foil is stamped onto the surface of the material with a heated die, which leaves the design of the die on the product. Foil blocking (or foil printing) does not necessarily have to be restricted to gold or silver - we can often foil block many other standard colours (although Pantone matching is not available with foil blocking).

Most commonly, foil blocking can be applied to leather products such as bookmarks and coasters, and card boxes (such as a Personalised Chocolate Box). This printing technique can be very effective, however some logos do not work well with foil blocking. The more complex the design, the less effective the printed product will be (click the image to enlarge it!):

Of course, you can always email your design to design@redbows.co.uk for our Design Studio to take a look at it for you if you’re not sure whether your artwork would be suitable for a foil blocked product.

When we quote lead times for promotional items these are always from the approved artwork stage of the ordering process. If any stage can cause a delay in delivery, this is it and to help improve our customer service we introduced an ‘in-house’ Design Studio at Redbows last year. This has helped our customers tremendously and we get rave reviews from them post sale - see the comments from our customer satisfaction surveys.

So, what is the actual problem? Well we have access to millions of pounds worth of printing equipment for the various processes and products but without suitable artwork they simply do not run. Delays typically occur at the artwork stage for various reasons: (1) no artwork exists and our design team has to generate it from scratch, (2) there are several people/clients involved in the artwork sign off stage, (3) we need to turn the artwork into a suitable vector file, and finally (4) where numerous amendments are made to the artwork resulting in several approval forms being generated.

Of them all (3) is the easiest for us to solve rapidly and (1) typically takes a couple of hours in design time. (2) however is another matter, and for this all we can offer is a professional design service that responds to your inputs, and (4) well as you can imagine this can be a nightmare, and costly.

So, how can you get your gifts quickly ? Let us help you get your artwork right first time! 

This is a topic that does sometimes cause quite a bit of confusion! How on earth can you have an image on a promotional item that appears to be one colour, but is actually printed using a four colour process? Surely that’s madness???

Unfortunately, this is very common. In this post I will try to explain why:

Spot Colours  - a ’spot colour’ is a completely flat colour. Usually, a design consists of no more than four spot colours (anything over this becomes impractical and expensive to print) and more often than not, only one or two.  When a design uses four colours it is sometimes referred to as a ‘four colour’ design. If your design uses spot colours, each will usually have a Pantone reference (see my post on Pantone references here).

Tints and Shading - if your design has tints and shading in it, the likelihood is that these will require a full colour print. Now this is where the confusion comes in - a full colour print (used to print photographic images and other images or text that has tints and shading) is also referred to as a ‘process print’, a ‘full colour process print’ and - unfortunately - a ‘four colour process print’. This doesn’t necessarily mean your artwork has four colours in it - it is referring to the method by which the artwork will be printed. Images that have tints and shading in them (photographic images etc) are printed using a process that uses four colours - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Black (K) - these four colours when used together can produce nearly any colour possible (very handy when printing a photographic image!) and provide what is known as a CMYK reference.

Here is an example of this effect. A single spot is used in Freddie 1. The second example (Freddie 2) is an example of a full colour (or ‘four colour process’ print). Notice how, strangely, they are both one colour.

Hopefully, this will help clear things up a little! If you’re still not sure as to whether your logo is a one colour or a full colour, here’s a little checklist to help work it out.

Checklist 

If your logo consists of:

A flat colour
One or more flat colours
Has no tints or shading in it…

…it’s a Spot Colour logo, and would be printed using perhaps a screen print process using Pantone references.

If your logo consists of:

Many colours, more than four
Colours containing tints and shading (otherwise known as ‘gradients’)

…it’s a Full colour logo, and would be printed using a four colour process procedure. Something worth noting - if your artwork has more than four spot colours, but all the colours are flat, it may just be the case that it is more economical to print it using a full colour process, as many spot colours tend to be quite costly!

And if you’re still in doubt, email your artwork to the Design Studio, where we’d be more than happy to let you know what’s what!

To Pantone or not to Pantone, that is the question…well, actually, we don’t give you the choice.

When your order your promotional items from Redbows, you will find that we ask you for your ‘Pantone references‘, or ‘PMS references’. Many of our clients are unsure as to what we are referring to when we ask for these, so I thought it was time for a little clarification!

When printing ’spot colours’ (ie. colours that are flat with no tints and shades in them), we ask for a PMS reference to ensure that the colour you are expecting will be the colour that gets delivered! Spot colours are collated in a ‘Swatch Library’, which can be found in your illustration application. The most popular and widely used of these is the ‘Pantone’ swatch library. This is a collection of pre-set colours that any Pantone-registered printer will be able to mix up, and the end result will be exactly the same wherever it is printed, and whom it is printed by. PMS references are usually more common with larger corporate companies who need to maintain a corporate image throughout everything that they produce, from staff uniforms to letterheads to brochures etc.

Whether big or small, we always ask our clients for a PMS reference when processing an order (except when printing in full colour process). This is to ensure that everyone is fully aware of the print that will be produced, and there are no big surprises when you open your delivery to find that your supposedly red print is actually…lime green (roughly the colour your face would turn if this were to happen).

I find the Pantone website a great source for colour management, and if you were to ask for us to choose a PMS reference on your behalf we can send you a link to the colour that we have chosen for you to view with your visual sample. If you would like to learn more about colour management, please visit www.pantone.com.

The Design Studio

What is our advice on what to put in a promotional gift’s imprint area ? Keep it simple. The basics often suffice and we recommend, logo, web address, phone number and marketing message. It all depends on how big the print area actually is and the number of them. For example, pens have print areas on the barrel and clips. Why is less more ? Well when you have a small imprint area, you may only be able to get all the information in using a very small font. Here the problems of readability and ink flow arise.  Think about your clients and their age range (for this read ability to view without glasses). Make what you print as big as possible, so that anyone can read it. Make the font too small and the ‘ink’ can bleed into the non-print areas. If in doubt you can always ask our Design Studio for a virtual visual and even order a pre-production sample.

One of the most common problems that we encounter when processing an order for promotional gifts is the file type that our clients supply their artwork in. Many of our clients haven’t even heard of a Vector file, and to be honest, many of them don’t want to know what one is either! But those of you who have a burning desire to understand the difference between a Vector and a Raster file…grab a cuppa, a nice digestive, and read on…

All printers of promotional gifts require artwork in an Illustrator EPS Vector file (or Vector file from a similar industry-standard illustration application). The reason for this is that a Vector file is the only file type that contains all of the necessary information to guarantee a perfectly printed product. I like to think of a Vector image as one that has been made up using a join-the-dot system - it consists of a series of dots, with lines that join these dots together. The beauty of a Vector image is that it can be enlarged or decreased in size without any loss of detail whatsoever - so if you’re buying branded folding city bikes (and yes, we can do these), beach balls or yoyos, you know your logo will stay perfectly clear and beautifully proportioned.

In contrast, we have the Raster file (and no, it doesn’t feature dreadlocks or Bob Marley lookalikes). These types of files are made up of pixels, rather than paths (the name given to those lines in my join-the-dot analogy above), meaning that when scaled to a certain size loss of detail may occur, and edges may appear blurred. We have all experienced taking photos on a digital camera - blow the image right up and all you see is a series of coloured squares. This is pixellation, and doesn’t make for a very good print job!

To demonstrate the above quick overview of the necessity of a Vector file, I have produced a quick illustration (click on the image to view a larger file - pdf):

Hopefully this quick overview of the difference between a Vector and a Raster image has helped clear the mists of confusion as to why we so desperately need a Vector file (and to think you all thought we were just being fussy!).

You can find more notes like this from the Redbows Design Studio on our corporate website.

Those of you who were hoping that this post was to announce the addition of burgers and other fast food delicacies to our promotional gift range will be severely disappointed!

Introducing the latest additions to the Redbows family - some shiny, sleek Apple Mac G5s - Intel Dual Core Duo - (don’t you just love the smell of a new computer - perhaps that’s a new idea for those car air freshener fragrances?). With the recent growth in design projects Redbows has been involved in, we felt it was time to join the Mac universe. Although our PCs are more than capable of doing the job, the Macs are an asset to our Design Studio, with the added benefit of improved file compatibility with our clients who send us files created on a Mac. Not only that, but we have now upgraded our facilities to the Adobe Creative Suite CS3, meaning our resources are now better than ever (and, during the much quieter periods, much more advanced doodling).

So, what do these extra additions to the Design Studio mean for our clients? Well, primarily it means that not only do we have one of the best ranges of promotional gifts in the UK, we also have one of the best complete design solutions to go with it…

Many of our clients don’t have their logo in an Illustrator EPS Vector file (I think I’ll save the explanation of why this is necessary for another post…), meaning that we often are required to convert the logo from the dreaded jPeg. With the addition of the extra technology at our disposal, this process is now much quicker, with most logo conversions taking place on the day that an order is placed.

In addition to that, we are now able to offer a more integrated and in-depth design service, from offering detailed advice and suggestions as to how products could be printed to a full graphic design service (logo design, optimised marketing etc). Our new facilities mean that our clients can get all they need for their next promotion in one place - a necessity for those who need to get a job done, and fast.

Whilst we have always offered Visual Samples to our clients, the expansion of the Design Studio means that these can now be offered within the hour, completely free of charge (except the much busier periods, however they can usually be provided within 24 hours). All you need to do to take advantage of this service is provide the name of the product you are looking at purchasing, along with a file containing the logo or artwork in question (preferably an Illustrator EPS Vector file). That’s it! You can email those to design@redbows.co.uk, then one of the team will email you back with your Visual Sample. This is an extremely useful service if you really are stuck and can’t visualise how the product will look. For examples of some recent Virtual Visuals - click here.

So as you can see, we’ve been busy at the Redbows Design Studio! We hope you agree that our creative services have never been better, and we hope that if you contact the Design Studio you enjoy working with us as much as we will enjoy working on your project!