Everything you need to prepare artwork that prints beautifully the first time. Bleed, resolution, colour, fonts and file formats explained in plain language for UAE brands, designers and marketing teams.
Ask an Expert Request a ProofAfter more than a decade of pushing paper, vinyl, board and fabric through presses across Ajman, Dubai and Abu Dhabi, we have seen every kind of artwork walk through our doors. Some files are pristine and press ready. Others need a small nudge. A few need a full rescue. This resource hub exists so you never fall into the second or third bucket. Whether you are a solo entrepreneur laying out your first business card in Canva, a marketing manager briefing an agency, or a seasoned graphic designer double checking your export settings, these guides distil the specs, habits and small tricks that separate a clean print from a costly reprint.
We wrote this collection the way we wish someone had written it for us when we started. No jargon walls. No lazy copy paste from Adobe help pages. Just real numbers, real examples and the small operational details that matter when a job hits our press floor at 2 am on a Tuesday. Bookmark the page. Share it with your team. Come back before every big print run.
Below you will find the fundamentals every printed piece depends on, followed by dedicated deep dives into the four artwork briefs we field most often in the UAE market: business cards, packaging, banners and brochures.
Almost every artwork rejection we send back to a client falls into one of six categories. Master these and your files will sail through prepress without a hiccup. Ignore even one and the finished job may look flat, blurry, cropped or wildly off brand. Read this section slowly.
Extend background artwork 3 mm past the trim on every edge. Keep text, logos and key detail at least 4 mm inside the trim. This absorbs the tiny movement all guillotines and die cutters produce.
Raster images should sit at 300 dots per inch at final print size. Web images at 72 DPI will look pixelated on paper. For large format banners viewed from 3 m or more, 150 DPI is acceptable.
Convert everything from RGB to CMYK before exporting. Our presses print with cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks. Bright RGB blues and greens shift dramatically when printed, so soft proof your file first.
For brand critical colours like a specific corporate red or the exact shade of a UAE flag, specify Pantone spot inks. We can match Pantone Solid Coated and Uncoated libraries on offset and pad printing.
Convert type to outlines before exporting to PDF, or embed all fonts in the file. Missing fonts get substituted automatically and the substitute rarely matches your intended layout.
Save the master artwork as PDF X 1a or PDF X 4. These preset standards lock down colour, transparency and fonts so the file behaves the same on our RIP as it does on your screen.
Vector files use mathematical curves and can be scaled to any size without losing quality. Logos, icons, type and line art should always be built or delivered in vector form using Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, Affinity Designer or Figma. Raster files are pixel grids. Photos, textures and complex artwork with soft gradients fall into this category. Use vector wherever possible. When you must supply raster, size it correctly before placement and never scale it up in the layout tool.
For coated papers we recommend the Fogra 39 or Fogra 51 profile. For uncoated stocks like a natural kraft or cotton card, switch to Fogra 47. Softproof inside Photoshop or Illustrator using View then Proof Setup to preview how your colours will translate under our presses. A punchy screen blue may render as a dusty navy on paper and this preview will show you before you send the file.
A properly compressed PDF for a business card should sit around 5 to 15 MB. A packaging dieline artwork rarely needs to exceed 80 MB. Banner files can climb to 200 MB when they hold high resolution photography. Send anything above 25 MB through WeTransfer, Google Drive or a shared Dropbox folder rather than email. Include the reference dieline, a low resolution JPG preview and a note listing paper, quantity and finishing options.
This is not a shame list. These slips happen to seasoned designers under deadline pressure. Knowing the traps in advance is the fastest way to skip them.
Every print job starts with two questions: what size and what stock. The table below covers the sizes we quote most often in the UAE market. Use it as a starting point and speak with our prepress team if your brief calls for something bespoke.
| Product | Standard Size | Bleed | Typical GSM |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business Card | 90 x 55 mm | 3 mm all sides | 350 to 600 gsm |
| Postcard | 148 x 105 mm (A6) | 3 mm all sides | 300 to 400 gsm |
| Trifold Brochure | 297 x 210 mm (A4 open) | 3 mm all sides | 150 to 250 gsm |
| A5 Flyer | 210 x 148 mm | 3 mm all sides | 130 to 170 gsm |
| Rollup Banner | 850 x 2000 mm | 50 mm bottom pocket | 440 gsm PVC |
| Fabric Backdrop | 3000 x 2250 mm | 25 mm all sides | 260 gsm polyester |
| Rigid Gift Box | Custom dieline | 3 mm on outer, 5 mm on tuck | 1200 to 2000 gsm greyboard |
Each of the four articles below expands on one of our most requested product families. They cover dielines, finishing options, common file traps and template downloads. Click through the topic that matches your current project.
Business cards sit in a wallet for months and travel through hundreds of hands. The tactile impression they leave is often the first physical touchpoint a UAE client has with your brand. Our business card guide walks you through the standard 90 by 55 mm layout, the classic square 55 by 55 mm option that has surged in popularity across Dubai design agencies, and the mini 85 by 25 mm slim card that fits inside modern minimalist wallets.
The guide explains how to set up spot UV, foil stamping, embossing, edge painting and letterpress in your artwork so the finishing house knows exactly which zones to treat. It covers rich versus flat blacks, the safe zone rules for two sided designs and how to structure your layout when you want a bleed image on one face and clean typography on the other. There is also a section on card weights, from a lightweight 300 gsm silk to a chunky 600 gsm cotton triplex that lands with real presence.
If you have ever received a card back from the printer with a slightly cropped logo or a Pantone that looks nothing like the swatch, the fixes are all inside this guide.
Read the Business Card GuidePackaging artwork is a different sport. You are no longer laying out a flat rectangle. You are wrapping a three dimensional object with panels that must line up when the box is glued, folded and closed. Our packaging guide starts with the dieline: what it is, how to read it, how to keep your artwork on the correct side of the fold lines and how to place bleed on tuck flaps that will disappear inside the finished box.
You will learn about substrate choices for the UAE market, from FSC certified white folding boxboard for cosmetic outers to kraft microflute for e commerce mailers that need to survive the Dubai to Ras Al Khaimah courier trip. The guide covers barrier coatings for food contact, gloss and matt laminations, soft touch films that add a velvet finish, hot foil stamping and the newer cold foil transfer process that lets you print CMYK over metallic areas.
There is also a dedicated section on regulatory content: barcodes at the correct 80 percent to 200 percent SC scale, ingredient panels for food and cosmetics under UAE municipality rules, and multilingual layouts that handle Arabic right to left flow alongside English.
Read the Packaging GuideLarge format work follows different rules than desktop print. Resolution needs, colour behaviour and legibility all shift when your artwork jumps from A4 to 3 metres tall. The banner guide starts with the two viewing distance formulas we use every day: text height in millimetres should be roughly equal to the intended viewing distance in metres multiplied by 30, and any raster image needs at least 100 DPI at full size for a wall mounted piece or 75 DPI for a fabric hoarding seen from across a mall atrium.
You will also find sizing tables for our full range of rollup banners, X banners, teardrop flags, mesh building wraps, backlit fabric prints and pop up backdrops. The guide walks through the correct bleed pockets for pole channels, grommet placement, wind slit patterns for outdoor mesh and the safe zones that keep your logo away from the pole sleeve or roller cassette.
UAE outdoor conditions add another layer. Fabric printed for the corniche will fade faster than the same print installed inside a Sharjah mall. The guide covers pigment ink versus dye sublimation ink, UV stable vinyls and the anti glare finishes we recommend for banners installed near reflective surfaces.
Read the Banner GuideBrochures still work harder than most digital assets when you hand them to a prospect in a boardroom. The brochure guide covers the four fold types we print most often: single fold or bifold, trifold, gate fold and Z fold. It shows why the two inner panels of a trifold must be 3 mm narrower than the outer panel so they tuck cleanly, and it explains how to lay out an eight page saddle stitched booklet using a printer spread so the pages fall in the correct order after binding.
Paper choice matters more here than most designers realise. A brochure printed on 130 gsm silk feels like disposable marketing collateral. Shift to 170 gsm silk and the same brochure feels premium. Push to 250 gsm uncoated with a soft touch laminate and it becomes a keepsake. The guide compares finishes side by side with real UAE case studies and honest cost implications.
You will also find the imposition, colour separation and font handling rules that stop your booklet from arriving with mismatched inks page to page. A short section covers Arabic typography, kerning quirks and the safe use of ligature rich fonts inside multi language brochures.
Read the Brochure GuideA mockup is a digital preview that shows your artwork wrapped around a photorealistic product. It is the single fastest way to catch a design flaw before ink hits substrate. When we send a client a mockup of their new packaging with the real dieline, they often spot issues in five minutes that would have taken a full press proof to reveal. Our design team can produce mockups for business cards, boxes, bottles, banners and apparel using your final artwork within a day.
If you prefer to build your own, use editable Smart Object files in Photoshop that let you drop your layout into place. Freepik, GraphicRiver and Mockup World offer thousands of templates. The important habit is to preview under realistic lighting. A pure white mockup studio look flatters everything. Test your artwork on a mockup that simulates the warm office lighting or the harsh mall spotlight where your product will actually live.
Include the following in your handover pack and you will avoid nine out of ten back and forth email chains. First, the working file in native format such as an INDD, AI or PSD. Second, the print ready PDF exported at PDF X 1a. Third, a low resolution JPG preview for quick approval. Fourth, a plain text file listing product name, quantity, paper weight, finishing options and delivery deadline. Fifth, any Pantone reference or physical swatch we should match. This five item pack takes ten minutes to prepare and can save days of production drift.
Rather than send you scrambling across the web for the right dieline, we host a library of Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and PDF templates for every product we print. Templates arrive with bleed, safe zone, fold lines and glue tabs already marked in non printing colours. All you have to do is drop your artwork in place and export. If a template you need is not in the library, our prepress team will build it around your exact size in a few hours and send it back for free.
We ship templates in metric measurements because that is the standard for the UAE, wider GCC and most of the world outside the United States. If your team works in inches, the templates convert cleanly. Every file is documented with a short PDF that explains layer structure, ink channels and any special finishing masks.
Our prepress team offers a free file check for any artwork you plan to print with us. Send us your draft and within one working day we will flag bleed issues, resolution gaps, colour risks and font problems, with clear notes on how to fix each one. No obligation to place the order.
WhatsApp Your Artwork Email info@brandingblitz.comOur design guidance reaches teams and freelancers working in Dubai Design District, Abu Dhabi Twofour54, Sharjah Media City, Ajman Free Zone, Ras Al Khaimah, Fujairah and Umm Al Quwain. Whether your brief comes from a boutique branding studio in Al Quoz or an in house creative team at a Sheikh Zayed Road tower, the same specs and habits apply. Print behaves the same everywhere. What changes is the substrate, the ink and the finishing choices, and that is where our team steps in with local knowledge and stock recommendations.
Feel free to book a walk through of our production facility in Ajman. Seeing paper, board, vinyl and fabric side by side under real light will do more for your next brief than any online swatch ever could. Bring your designer, bring your marketing lead, bring your CEO. We will pour the karak.
