Business Printing: Design It Yourself or Go Professional?

Tools like Canva, Affinity and Adobe Express put design in everyone’s hands. For simple jobs, that’s often all you need.

The pros

• It costs less. You only pay for the printing.
• It’s quick. You can make changes the moment you need them.
• You’re in control. Nobody knows your business better than you.
• It suits simple, short-lived items. Think event flyers, price lists or a one-off poster.

The cons

• Colours can shift. Screens show colour in RGB. Printers use CMYK. Bright blues, greens and pinks often print duller than you expect.
• Images can print blurry. A photo that looks sharp on your phone may be far too small for print.
• Edges get trimmed. Without bleed, you can get thin white lines at the edges. Text placed too close to the edge can get cut off.
• Your brand can drift. Each new item uses slightly different fonts, colours or logo versions, so your business looks less polished.
• It takes time. An hour spent fixing a flyer is an hour away from your customers.

The pros

• It’s print-ready first time. Colours, bleed, resolution and fonts are set up properly, so there are no nasty surprises.
• It sells better. A designer knows where to put the eye first: your offer, your name, then how to get in touch.
• Your brand stays consistent. Cards, flyers, signs and your website all look like they belong together.
• You get reusable files. Reprints and updates are quick and cheap.
• It saves you time. You give a short brief and approve a proof.

The cons

• It costs more up front. You pay for design as well as printing.
• It takes a little longer. Allow time for a brief, a draft and changes.
• You need to give feedback. The clearer your brief, the better the result.

Which should you choose?

Ask yourself three questions. Will people keep it? How many will you print? Does it need to win you work? If the answer to any of these is yes, a designer usually pays for itself. Business cards, shop signs, brochures and anything with your logo on it for years fit here.

If it’s a short run that will be gone in a week, designing it yourself is often fine. Just set the file up properly.

Whoever designs it, these are the settings that make the difference between a good print and a reprint. Our Print Specifications Guide has the full detail and sizes for every product.

1. CMYK colour. Set up your design in CMYK, not RGB, so what you see is closer to what prints.
2. 3 mm bleed. Extend backgrounds and images 3 mm past every edge. An A5 flyer becomes 154 × 216 mm.
3. A safe area. Keep text and logos at least 4 mm inside the trim line.
4. 300 dpi images. Check photos at the size they’ll print. Watch out for AI images, which are often low resolution.
5. Fonts as outlines. Convert text to outlines (curves) so it prints exactly as you designed it.
6. The right black. Use plain black (100% K) for small text, and rich black for large black areas, so they look deep, not grey.
7. No crop marks. Turn off crop and registration marks when you export.
8. A print PDF. Export a PDF (PDF/X-1a or PDF/X-4), one page per printed side.

Using Canva? You need Canva Pro to download a CMYK PDF, and Canva can’t convert text to outlines. Our artwork check is the easy fix (more on that below).

Tools like ChatGPT can now make a flyer, a poster or even a logo in seconds. We’re happy to print AI artwork. But AI images are made for screens, not paper, so they often need work before they print well. Here’s why.

Too few pixels for print

ChatGPT’s image tool reliably makes images up to about 2,560 pixels wide, and common sizes are smaller, like 1,536 × 1,024 (OpenAI). At 300 dpi, 1,536 pixels prints only 13 cm wide. An A4 page needs about 2,480 × 3,508 pixels, and an A1 poster nearly 10,000 pixels on its long side. Upscaling adds pixels, not real detail, so edges and text can look soft.

Screen colours, not print colours

AI images come as PNG or WebP files, which use screen colours (RGB). Print uses CMYK. The bright, glowing colours AI loves often print noticeably duller.

The wrong shape, with no bleed

AI images come in set shapes, like square or 3:2. They don’t match A4, DL or business card sizes, and they have no bleed or safe area. So the image has to be cropped or extended, and text near the edge can get trimmed off.

Text you can’t edit

The words are part of the picture. You can’t fix a typo or change a phone number. You have to generate the whole image again and hope. AI text has improved a lot, but check every letter, number and price. Small text often prints fuzzy.

Not quite your logo

AI often redraws a logo slightly differently each time, or gets it wrong. It’s also a flat image, not a vector. That means it can’t be cut from vinyl, embroidered or enlarged for a sign without losing quality.

Who owns it?

The law on who owns AI-generated images is still unsettled. AI can also produce images that look like someone else’s work or brand. That’s a real risk for anything you’ll use for years, like a logo or a shop sign.

How to use AI well

AI is great for ideas. Use it to try out styles, layouts and wording. Then let a designer rebuild it properly, with real fonts, your actual logo, CMYK colours, the right size and bleed. Just add your AI image to your brief when you choose “Have us design it”.

Want to print your AI artwork as it is? Talk to us. We’ll tell you honestly how it will look at the size you want, and print it if you’re happy.

Whichever way you go, we make it easy to get it right.

Designing it yourself?

• Order online with a live price. Choose your product, paper and quantity in our Print Shop and upload your PDF.
• Your file is checked as you upload. We check the size, bleed, colours, image quality and fonts straight away, and tell you what to fix before you pay.
• Add a human check for €10. Tick the artwork check and a person looks over your file before it prints.

Want it designed for you?

• Have us design it. When you order, choose “Have us design it”, send a short brief and your logo, and we create print-ready artwork. The fee is set per product and shows before you pay, for example €55 for business cards or €82.50 for an A6 postcard. It adds about 2 to 3 working days, and nothing prints until you approve the proof we email you.
• Design to Order (from €195). For bigger or custom jobs, like packaging, shop signs, multi-page brochures and anything not in our shop, quoted per job.
• Brand Kit (€1,250). A full logo set, colours, fonts, a simple brand guide, business card design and social templates.
• Brand Launch (€2,450). Everything in Brand Kit, plus stationery, a flyer and signage files.

All prices exclude VAT. See our branding and design packages, or our print, signage and merch service for signs, workwear and anything not in the shop. New to our Print Shop? Use code NEON10 for 10% off your first order.