For several years – perhaps a decade or more – we’ve turned to moo.com to print our designs as Christmas cards and greeting cards. Approaching Christmas, we typically wait for an offer to arrive in the inbox and enjoy 10-15% off the cost. This year though, I realised that we’d missed the early November offer and, with a batch of cards likely to cost approaching £90, decided to see what other options there were.

After some pricing up, we settled on digitalprinting.co.uk. A batch of very similar cards looked to cost about a third of the price and, even after exploring more and discovering that VAT and delivery needed to be added on, it was going to be less than half the cost of moo.com, even if we’d snagged a discount.

Speaking of snags though, there was one other significant one. While moo.com just require the artwork be uploaded as image files at a certain number of pixels wide and high, digitalprinting.co.uk required print-ready CMYK artwork. Most graphics software, including everything I had installed, works with RGB colours (Red / Green / Blue) and the results of sending an RGB file through a CMYK print process (Cyan / Magenta / Yellow / Black) can be unpredictable.

After some research, it looked like the best option was to install a free trial of Adobe Illustrator, produce the required file from the artwork I had scanned in, and then uninstall Illustrator. It worked – very well in fact – but that was with some previous experience of Illustrator and lots of hours put into other graphics packages. All in all, I’d give digitalprinting.co.uk a cautious recommendation: much cheaper and an excellent result but you’ve got to have the technical skills to produce the right kind of source file.