
Printing Colour Modes:
CMYK (full colour): Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black.
Percentage values are assigned to these four inks, creating the full colour spectrum.
If you’re designing artwork for a website, you’d use RGB, whereas print mainly uses CMYK or PMS, Pantone Matching System.
If your artwork has an RGB Colour mode we will convert to CMYK, a slight colour variance may occur.
Bleed Area:
The Bleed Area is like an extension to your artwork, if you’re wanting your design to extend to the edge of the page, you extend your design to fill this area. This area will be trimmed from your final document to eliminate any unwanted borders. The Bleed Area is normally set to 2mm on all edges of the artwork.
Booklet printing requires a minimum of 5mm bleed on all edges.
Trim:
Where your design is to be guillotined to produce the product’s finished size.
Crop Marks (thin lines placed on the corners of the artwork) indicate where the paper should be trimmed after printing. Crop Marks are important for any artwork, especially if the design Bleeds to the edge.
Safe Zones:
The Safe Zone is 3mm from the trim line. Make sure all important text and design elements are kept within this area. Areas outside of the Safe Zone may be trimmed.
Booklet Binding:
Perfect binding uses ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) adhesives whereas PUR uses polyurethane reactive (PUR) adhesives. PUR adhesive offers increased binding strength.
Booklet “creep” will occur during finishing so we recommend you keep text and non-bleed images at least 10mm from the trim line.
Rich Blacks
We strongly recommend you use CMYK Rich Black on large areas of black to ensure a nice solid result. A good mixture for CMYK Rich Black on;
- Heavier stock weights use 60 / 50 / 50 / 100
- Lighter stock weights use 30 / 0 / 0 / 100

Templates
There’s a few…
Send through an email with a brief outline of your printing requirements and we will locate the correct template for your project.

Below is a general guide for Australian paper sizes.
Remember width proceeds height.
A SERIES
Paper Sizes
Business Cards
DL
A7
A6
A5
A4
A3
A2
A1
A0
Size in Millimeters – mm
(without bleed area)
90mm x 55mm
210mm x 99mm
74mm x 105mm
105mm x 148mm
148mm x 210mm
210mm x 297mm
297mm x 420mm
420mm x 594mm
594mm x 841mm
841mm x 1188mm
Size in Millimeters – mm
(with 2mm bleed area)
94mm x 59mm
214mm x 103mm
78mm x 109mm
109mm x 152mm
152mm x 214mm
214mm x 301mm
307mm x 430mm*
430mm x 604mm*
604mm x 851mm*
851mm x 1198mm*
*5mm bleed added for Booklets.
Australian Envelope Size Guide
DL | 110 x 220mm | DL flyers (99 x 210 mm), A5 folded once, A4 folded into thirds |
DLX | 120 x 235mm | Mail out, fits more documents than a DL size |
C5 | 162 x 229mm | A5, A4 folded once |
C4 | 229 x 324mm | A4 unfolded, A3 folded once |
Image Resolution for high quality printing.
Remember, images on screen devices are usually displayed at 72dpi.
Whereas images set at 300dpi are recommended for quality sharp print material.
DPI stands for Dots Per Inch
The higher the Dots Per Inch (dpi) the higher the image quality, for best quality results we always recommend 300dpi.
Printing an image that has a resolution less than 300dpi, odds are it’s going to be pixelated/blurry.
At postcardMoon we double check your artwork files for you, making sure resolution requirements are met for high quality printing. If any issues are raised we will inform you, we do not send to print “as is”.

