On January 9, 3D-Printing firm Glowforge announced the release of a new line of state-of-the-art materials designed to be used together with its celebrated 3D laser printer.

According to Bailey Nelson, a Senior Marketing Manager at the Seattle-based startup, CEO Dan Shapiro came up with the idea for the product, called Proofgrade™, which was built by the firm’s operations team and laser design experts.

Although Proofgrade™ was not crowdfunded like the Glowforge 3D laser printer, it was well-received by participants in the Glowforge Beta program. Nelson attributes its success to features such as “smart” QR codes which allow for fine-tuning of the product and hardwoods and leathers sourced from “the highest quality standards.”

(A Glowforge press release distributed via Business Wire notes that the materials are also compatible with other CO2 laser cutters and engravers.)

The new product is currently only available to Glowforge customers via Proofgrade.com, but Nelson stated in an email that it will soon be purchasable by all.

“We’ll continue to expand the range of Proofgrade material offerings,” she said, “and plan to open the store up to the public.”

A frequent source of frustration for our design and pre-press team here are the shop is incorrect file preparation.
 
Often we find ourselves working with a file submitted for a job that won’t work with our printers. It gets worse if there are no bleeds on the file, or if it’s not formatted in CMYK. Sometimes it’s not even sent as a PDF!
 
Such things are aggravating both for us and our customers, who both just want to get the job done on time. These steps for preparing files for your printer will minimize frustration for all parties involved.
 
Hundreds of man-hours have been wasted (both for us and our customers) due to a file being submitted by a customer in Word or Publisher, when if should have been submitted as a PDF. Word and Publisher will not save fonts into the documents, so if you have any fun and interesting fonts it most likely won’t get to us.
 
The solution then is to submit files as PDFs. We ask our customers to design their files in a program such as Photoshop or InDesign, convert their files to PDF, and then submit those files to us. If you don’t have access to these Adobe programs just save your files as PDFs from whatever program you are using.
 
Another problem we frequently face here at the shop is a lack of bleeds on files. Bleeds are the extra space added to the edge of a file that will be cut off during production. There needs to be a buffer zone so no valuable information is cut off. For example, a letter size sheet (8.5x11) would need bleeds of 8.625x11.125. See the illustration below:

Bleeds are required on all documents that do not have all-white borders. Very rarely is there a job which does not require bleeds. Therefore, we kindly ask our customers to always include bleeds when designing their products.
 
The minimum bleeds space is .125 inches for paper products, but 0.5 inches for banners and signs.
 
Another important step that must be remembered (but is often forgotten) is formatting the file in CMYK. Kristin wrote a post on CMYK a few weeks back, so in case you want to get up-to-speed on that, please check that out. In the meantime, please remember that if your file has images or color in it, and it’s not in CMYK, we will not be able to print it correctly.
 
We hope that this brief guide will be of use to you. As a quick review remember to design your file in the correct program, submit it as a PDF, include bleeds on the file, and to make sure the file is formatted in CMYK. A good designer should be able to do all of these things for you. If you need assistance with any of your projects, we are more than happy to help for a setup fee.
 
And as always, be sure to leave a comment if you have any questions!

This post was written by Kristin Thornton, our shop’s graphic designer. In this post, Kristin explains what CMYK is, and why it matters to both us and our customers. – L.S.
 
In elementary school we all learned the basics of mixing primary colors by finger painting using the base primary colors: red, blue, and yellow.
 
When you mix red and yellow, you get orange. When you mix yellow and blue, you get green.
 
If you’re like my six-year-old daughter, you mix them all together to make it a big brown-black mess.
 
In the print world, we start out with cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The four-color process uses the color space known as CMYK. (I guess they didn’t want to use “B” for “black” because people may mistake it for “blue.”)
 
The four colors are combined, one layer at a time in multiple runs, to create the desired colors. Just like painting, if we mix the ink in a specific order we get varied outcomes of color.

Above is a colored image separated into cyan (C), magenta (M), yellow (Y), and black (K). When combined, they make the finished flower on the right.
 
When dealing with photos and sending them to us for printing, it is best to have them converted to CMYK. If you need assistance transferring your photos to CMYK, we can do so if you send them to us with the details of your project needs.
 
One customer was pleased when they brought in a personal photo to add to their business card. I was able to transfer it to CMYK and adjust the image so that their face would look good on their business cards.
 
(Please note that most pictures taken with cameras and cell phones will use the format of Red, Green, Blue, or RGB.)
 
In a future post, I will explain a bit more about why RGB and CMYK look different.