Session 6: Real-World Design II — Print & Identity

Every print job is cut after printing, and no cutter is perfectly accurate — the blade can be a millimetre or two off in any direction. Bleed is the extra area you add beyond the finished edge so that any small cutting error reveals more of your design rather than a white strip. The standard is 3mm on every side, so an A5 flyer at 148×210mm is designed at 154×216mm with the extra 3mm all round carrying your background colour or image. Any element that touches the edge — a full-bleed photo, a coloured background — must extend into the bleed.

The other side of the same problem is the safe margin. Because the cut can move inward as well as outward, anything important must sit well inside the trim edge. Keep text and logos at least 5mm inside the trim — many printers ask for 10mm on larger pieces. This is why the margin discipline from session one is not aesthetic but mechanical: a flyer with text 2mm from the edge will occasionally arrive with the text cut.

Crop marks are the small lines in the corners showing the printer where to cut. Canva adds them when you tick the option in PDF Print export. Some Nigerian digital printers do not need them and will ask you to remove them; ask. The full set of terms — bleed, trim, safe area, crop marks — is the vocabulary that makes a printer take you seriously, and using it correctly is often the difference between a job that comes back right and one that comes back with white edges.

Screens make colour with RGB — red, green and blue light added together, which can produce very bright, saturated colours. Presses make colour with CMYK — cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks layered on paper, which cannot reach the same brightness. Every RGB design is converted to CMYK at some point in printing, and in that conversion some colours dull. Bright electric blues, vivid greens and hot pinks are the worst affected; they come back noticeably flatter than they looked on your screen.

The professional response is not to fight it but to design for it. Avoid depending on very saturated colours for anything critical. Expect your printed piece to be slightly duller than the screen and tell the client before they see it. Where a specific brand colour must be exact — a corporate blue, for instance — the correct answer is a spot colour such as a Pantone, which is a mixed ink rather than a CMYK mixture; that is a specialist conversation with the printer and beyond Canva, but knowing it exists tells a client you understand print.

Also understand that your screen is not calibrated. A cheap laptop screen and a phone screen show the same file differently, and neither matches a press. The reliable reference is a printed proof. For any job where colour matters commercially, ask the printer for a proof and approve it before the full run — a proof costs a little and a ruined five-hundred-piece run costs a great deal.

Print needs roughly 300 DPI — dots per inch — at the final printed size. A4 at 300 DPI is about 2480×3508 pixels. A screen image at 96 DPI looks fine online and prints soft. The rule that saves jobs is to think in final pixel dimensions: multiply the physical size in inches by 300. A business card at 85×55mm is about 3.35×2.17 inches, so it needs roughly 1004×650 pixels. A banner at 1×2 metres is a different problem entirely, discussed below.

Canva's free tier exports at screen resolution, which is fine for A5 and A4 pieces viewed at arm's length but marginal for anything larger. Two workarounds: design at a larger canvas size so the exported pixels are sufficient — designing an A4 at A2 dimensions gives you four times the pixels — or use Canva Pro's size-multiplier export. Either way, check the exported file's actual pixel dimensions before sending, because 'it looked fine on screen' is the sentence that precedes every soft print job.

Large format breaks the 300 DPI rule. A roll-up banner or a billboard is viewed from metres away, so printers typically ask for 100–150 DPI at full size, or even less for billboards. The right move is always the same: ask the printer what resolution and file format they want before you design. Printers answer this question freely, and asking it early is the single most professional habit in print work.

Paper choice changes how a design reads as much as the design does. GSM is the weight in grams per square metre: 130–170gsm is standard flyer paper, 250–300gsm is card stock for business cards and premium flyers, and 350gsm and above is heavy card. Matte finishes read as refined and are easier to read under bright light; gloss finishes make colours pop and suit photographs and food; silk or satin sits between them and is the most common premium choice. A business card on 130gsm feels disposable no matter how well it is designed, and clients notice the paper before they notice the layout.

The Nigerian print conversation has specifics worth knowing. Most small jobs go to digital printers in places like Shomolu and Ojuelegba in Lagos, or local equivalents elsewhere, and they will usually accept a PDF. Ask three things every time: what file format and resolution they want, what bleed they require, and what paper stock they recommend for the quantity. Then ask for a proof — a single printed sample — before the full run, especially for anything with a specific brand colour. Get the quote in writing including paper, quantity, finish and turnaround, because prices vary widely and verbal quotes change.

Build a relationship with one good printer rather than shopping each job. A printer who knows your files, your usual stocks and your standards will catch your mistakes before they print, which is worth far more than a small price difference. This relationship is a genuine business asset and it takes three or four jobs to build.

The business card is the smallest and most-examined piece you will design. At 85×55mm there is room for the name, the role, one or two contact routes and the logo — nothing more. The most common failure is cramming a full address, three phone numbers, four social handles and a list of services onto it, which makes it unreadable and unusable. Choose one primary contact route. Keep type at 7pt or above, use 300gsm card, and leave real margins — a card that feels airy reads as confident.

The letterhead carries the same identity onto A4 with the logo and contact details in a header and often a thin footer. The design constraint is that the actual letter must have room: keep the header compact and leave generous space for content, and remember that whatever you design will be printed on repeatedly, so it must be quiet rather than decorative. Deliver it as an editable document the client can actually type into — a Word file or a Canva template link — not as a flat image, because a letterhead nobody can use is worthless.

The banner or roll-up inverts the flyer logic entirely. It is read from several metres away, so it needs one headline in enormous type, the logo large, and almost nothing else. A roll-up also has its bottom third largely hidden behind the stand mechanism and by people standing in front of it, so keep all critical content in the top two-thirds. Designing a roll-up like an enlarged flyer is the standard amateur error and it produces a piece that communicates nothing from the distance it exists to be seen at.