PREPARING YOUR FILES FOR RISOGRAPH
Making your files for Risograph printing is a lot like preparing to screen print. You will need to make a file for each colour you would like to print with. These files are what we call separations, which you can think of like stencils. Separations for Risograph can be very simple – for example, you might want a header or title in one colour, and some text in another, and so the header and body text would each need to be in their own document. Or they can be very complex, making use of colour blending across layers, or intricate arrangements of shapes, lines, text, photographs and so on.
If you’re new to Risograph, we highly recommend having a read of Team Trident Press’s Guide to Risography which is free to read online.
We can help with file set up and colour separations, it’s what we do, however this may incur an extra charge.
Technical details
*PDF is best!*
*BLACK AND WHITE (or greyscale) and 300dpi*
We require 5mm bleed on full bleed designs and remember to add crop marks if we will be trimming something to size for you.
A5 books:
A more cost-effective size is 136 x 195mm instead of A5.
The biggest sheet size we use with our printers is A3. This means that we cannot print all the way to the edge of the paper.
For publications, we require:
Inner pages (excluding cover): SINGLE PAGE PDF
Cover: supply it as a spread, with outside back cover (OBC) on the left and outside front cover (IBC) on the right.
RISOGRAPH only
You will need to prepare ONE FILE PER COLOUR. It is important to include the colour you intend for each layer in the file name when sending it to us to print. For example:
ABC_ARTWORK_A3_YELLOW.pdf
ABC_ARTWORK_A3_BLUE.pdf
If you are printing in more that one colour send us a low resolution mock up image of your design that we can use as a reference.
The total printable area is: 281mm wide x 404mm high
Basic tips for RISOGRAPH!
Risograph printing is not the most accurate process, and registration can often shift during printing. This should be taken into account when design for Riso, especially if printing double-sided, or with multiple layers of colour. For example, printing multiple layers of text or thin lines will be blurry and hard to read.
Set all text for printing with Risograph to registration black so that it prints legibly. Typefaces should be set to 8pt or larger.
The machine does not deal well with large areas of flat colour, so avoid this when making your artwork. You can also play with opacities if you have some areas of flat colour and want a smooth finish.
Low contrast images may not come out very well, so take care when preparing photographs, for example.
If you are preparing your images in Photoshop, make sure that you flatten the layers before exporting this as a PDF.