What file setup specifications would be best for an A4 kids illustrated book?

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
October 26, 2019
4 replies
4104 views

Hello

I am a new illustrator, illustrating a children’s book for a client. They intended to get it published (I don’t know with who). I never having illustrated a book for official printing before was wondering if you know or have a page that you can link me too that list what specifications would be best for the final product?/ What you would recommend.

e.g. 300dpi resolution or something higher?

If I have the dimensions in centimetre, should I change the resolution to 300 pixels/cm?

RGB or CMYK colour print profile?

Same size as physical printing (e.g A4 or create a bigger size (A3) so it can be scaled down?

I have created artworks before, just never for official printing, so I don’t want to mess things up and have to redo everything if it turns out I am wrong.

Thanks

I appreciate your help

This topic has been closed for replies.

D Fosse

Community Expert

One more thing: don't call it "dpi" - it's not only wrong, but more importantly: it hides the actual meaning of the term. It's not dots, it's pixels. Pixels per inch. Calling it by the correct term makes the relationships easier to understand. The term ppi is to be read literally, word for word, and when you do that, the whole thing eventually becomes very obvious. There's no hidden meaning here, it means exactly what it says.

phoenixknightAuthor

Known Participant

Oh Okay! will do!

A

Anonymous

I'd recommend calibrating your monitor too if you haven't already. I used to have my monitor set to what looked good to me then when I'd print, sections with darker colours would be completely black.

phoenixknightAuthor

Known Participant

I will look into that too, thanks for the information/helpful hint!

D Fosse

Community Expert

300 pixels per inch is the general rule of thumb for book and magazine print.

However, ppi isn't a native property. It's a secondary, derived number. What you want is to have enough pixels in the file, so that 300 ppi is the resulting pixel density at the required physical print size. Read that again, slowly. It's a standard equation: pixels per inch. It means exactly what it says.

Work in RGB. I'd recommend Adobe RGB for this - but note that you need color managed software to view this correctly. The book itself is normally made by a designer using InDesign. RGB artwork is placed in InDesign and converted to final CMYK on output to press-ready PDF. This allows easy repurposing for changing/unknown print processes.

Note that four color CMYK processes are unable to reproduce a lot of colors available in RGB, like deep blues or bright yellow-greens. This is known as gamut clipping and is a large subject by itself. You can proof to the print profile to get a preview on screen.

The exception is if you have elements that should be overprinted from the black plate only (K-only black / 100K black). Then you need to build this in CMYK from the beginning, but then you also need to know which CMYK profile will ultimately be used.