A guide to designing and exporting your campaign artwork ready to upload to Penny Black
Artwork requirements
Your campaign artwork can be uploaded to Penny Black as a PDF with the following requirements:
Dimensions
| Epson | Xerox | |
|---|---|---|
| A6 | 99 x 142 mm | 105 x 148 mm |
| A5 | 142 x 204 mm | 148 x 210 mm |
| A4 | 204 x 291 mm | 210 x 297 mm |
Colour profile
If you are using Penny Black recommended printers, or any home/office range printer, please use an sRGB colour profile.
Whilst the printers primarily use inkjet printers with CMYK cartridges, they are optimised to work with images in the RGB colour space and give the most consistent results across devices.
PDF size
The size of your PDF will impact print speed, but it also depends on your content. If the file is mainly white with text then it will be much smaller than an image-heavy file.
The Penny Black platform optimises files for you, but they must be below 2 MB to upload a personalised artwork.
For the fastest possible printing, we recommend the following guidelines for filesize:
- 250 KB for A6
- 500 KB for A5
Content
Use layers in your design tool of choice, and ensure that all personalised elements are removed from your designs before exporting and uploading them to Penny Black e.g. “Hello [name]” and QR Codes. These will be added in the Penny Black Artwork Builder.
Using InDesign or Canva?
See our guide with recommended export settings for your design tools here. For simple designs, or if you have limited design resources, you can also build designs directly in our Artwork Builder from plain PDFs.
Design Best Practice
- Include a clear header to attract attention
- Bold personalisation - this is what makes your inserts outperform standard inserts. Make it big and bold
- Limit paragraphs of text - keep blocks of text to a few lines
- A clear CTA incentivising customers to scan e.g. “Scan to unlock your discount”
- Make sure your CTA links to the header, and is value-led. Keep it focused on the objective of the campaign
- Your QR code should be large with an outline to draw attention
Using imagery in your dynamic campaigns
- Artwork is printed at 300DPI to optimise print speed and quality
- If you want to use imagery in your campaign artwork, it must be imported as a high-resolution file to ensure it prints at 300 DPI
- Use 75% image quality for JPEG images. If the resulting PDF is large and image-heavy, and you are concerned about print speed, reduce the image quality to 50%