FAQ

How do I register/create an account?

Click on the key on the top right hand side. This will take you to the register page.

How do I update my account information?

When loged in. Click on the suitcase, this will take you to your main Dashboard where you can see orders, and change information

Now when on this page click click Account Information

I forgot my password. What do I do?

When attempting to login, if your password fails, it will pop up saying Forgot Your Password?. If not just login with no password and it will pop up. Click "Forgot Your Password?"

Can I change my shipping address?

You have the ability to edit the shipping address, as long as your order has not been processed and you have registered. Just go to your Order History, in "My Account" section. Select the order, and click on the "Edit Shipping Address" link to update. If your order has been processed, you will not be able to change your shipping address. We apologies for any inconvenience and hope you understand our need to keep our costs at a minimum and our turnaround times fast. This helps us provide you with the best value in the printing industry.

Can I cancel or change my order?

In an effort to keep costs down and to pass those savings along to customers in the form of great prices, Design Print Shop is a fully automated, self-service web site. As we stated on our web site and throughout the checkout process, orders may not be changed or cancelled once submitted. We apologize for any inconvenience. We hope you understand our need to keep our costs at a minimum and our turnaround times fast, in order to continue to provide you with the best value in the printing industry.

What if I am not satisfied with my order?

The Design Print Shop Guarantee of Satisfaction. Design Print Shop stands behinds the quality of its products and service. If you are not satisfied with your purchase from us, simply contact Customer Care on email (info@designprintshop.co.uk) within 2 days from the date you receive it and we will investigate the product(s) in question, if we need to refund you, we will refund you excluding postage and processing costs. If an Item is to be return back to us, it must be return in its original packaging and perfect condition. If we ask you to return back a product, you will be responsible for all the postage cost and evidence of postage. Indeed, Design Print Shop takes great pride in its commitment to customer satisfaction. However, certain circumstances are beyond our control. Please note that we cannot be responsible for: - Spelling, punctuation or grammatical errors made by the customer. - Inferior quality or low-resolution of uploaded images. - Design errors introduced by the customer in the document creation process. - Errors in user-selected options such as choice of finish, quantity or product type. Please preview your designs carefully and correct any mistakes prior to placing your order. In an effort to keep costs down and pass substantial savings along to our customers, Design Print Shop does not proof documents created by its customers prior to processing.

What is your return policy?

Design Print Shop is committed to customer satisfaction. We will reprint or refund the cost of any product that fails to meet our customer's quality expectations. However, we cannot take responsibility for typing, image, or design errors introduced by customers in the document creation process. In an effort to keep costs down and pass those savings along to our customers, Design Print Shop does not review design / documents for content or spelling. Design Print Shop guarantees that you will be satisfied with the quality of our products. If you are not satisfied with any product, please contact Customer Care within 2 days of receiving your order. Please include your order number, e-mail address you used to order, and reason for dissatisfaction. If you have not received your order by the time it was promised, please contact Customer Care within thirty days from the date it was promised to arrive.

The order I received is not complete. What do I do?

If you have received your order and believe that it is not complete, please review the details of your order to verify that all items have been shipped together. If anything is missing do not hesitate to contact us. Be sure to include your name, e-mail address and order number to help expedite our processing of your request.

What methods of payment do you accept?

Design Print Shop accepts the following payment methods on our secure site: Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal.

What should I know about color printing and proofs?
Viewing color on your monitor

Computer monitors use RGB to display color. RBG stands for Red, Green and Blue. When you print something to the CMYK process, for best results, you need to convert any RBG images, to CMYK images first. Sometimes you'll see some changes to the image when you make this conversion, so it's better that you see the changes first before uploading your file. Also some colors that you see on your screen are very difficult to reproduce exactly using CMYK (or any other printing method). Therefore if you have the software that enables you to process your image into CMYK before you upload the image to Design Print Shop, you'll have a close idea of what you'll get once the printed products are shipped to you. Some of the hardest colors to match going from RGB to CMYK are blues.

Why do certain colours look different after they print?

Most home and small business printers are either inexpensive ink-jet printers, or color laser printers. It is impossible to calibrate any of these systems as they have a wide and varied range of methods of printing. Even though some printers use CMYK inks, many other factors have to be considered, and it is impossible to expect to consistently print perfect color. Design Print Shop owns an extremely high-end, multi-million dollar printing facility, with consistent quality control and colour correction standards. While Design Print Shop maintains as high standards as possible, it is still almost impossible to print and expect to see exactly the same colour every day. There are so many possible factors that can affect the colour on your printed materials. The weather outside can play a part in affecting how the ink dries on the paper, and can change the colour slightly. The paper delivered from the paper mill may be slightly brighter. The ink density and constant on-press fluctuations in colour, printing press running temperature or blanket wear, could also affect colour slightly. It is impossible to expect that any professional printer can produce exactly the same printed blue on two separate days. However, Design Print Shop does have high quality controls to ensure as little variation as possible, especially within a single product order.

The differences between monitors

You also have to take into consideration that different monitor types display colors differently. For instance, many LCD or laptop monitors cannot display as much of a range of colors as other monitors. On these monitors, colors can lose contrast and many colors sometimes look similar to others (for instance, dark greens and browns). Professional designers and prepress companies use colour-calibrated monitors to ensure that the colour they see on their screens is as close as possible to the actual colour of the file. Most home users cannot afford to purchase these very high-end monitors, and therefore have to understand that there will ALWAYS be variance from what they see on the screen to what they see on their printer, or any other output device.

Why do certain colours look different after they print?

Most home and small business printers are either inexpensive ink-jet printers, or color laser printers. It is impossible to calibrate any of these systems as they have a wide and varied range of methods of printing. Even though some printers use CMYK inks, many other factors have to be considered, and it is impossible to expect to consistently print perfect color. Design Print Shop owns an extremely high-end, multi-million dollar printing facility, with consistent quality control and colour correction standards. While Design Print Shop maintains as high standards as possible, it is still almost impossible to print and expect to see exactly the same colour every day. There are so many possible factors that can affect the colour on your printed materials. The weather outside can play a part in affecting how the ink dries on the paper, and can change the colour slightly. The paper delivered from the paper mill may be slightly brighter. The ink density and constant on-press fluctuations in colour, printing press running temperature or blanket wear, could also affect colour slightly. It is impossible to expect that any professional printer can produce exactly the same printed blue on two separate days. However, Design Print Shop does have high quality controls to ensure as little variation as possible, especially within a single product order.

File Types: JPG, PNG, GIF or BMP

Designitnow.co.uk allows you to upload files in a variety of formats to suit your needs. Different file types have properties that affect the quality of your images, and consequently the prints that are created. We accept JPG, PNG, GIF or BMP files through our direct uploader, via exactprint.co.uk website, or on discs that you send to us. If you would like to FTP your files to us, then you may also upload archived ZIP or RAR files that include multiple images. If you are not sure which format to use, consider the properties that each file type has.

TIFF and PNG are lossless files, PNG will give you a colourless background (suitable if you do not have the background colour to be printed with your order) and will retain all data found in the original image file, no matter how many times you change or resave them. Working with these types of files is the best way to ensure optimum results for your prints. However, the drawback is they have extremely large file sizes, which can be more cumbersome to work with.

JPEG’s have smaller file sizes due to the compression methods used. A JPEG is a lossy file, so if it is edited and saved many times it will degrade because too much compression can cause the images to lose information. Over time, this will result in an unprintable image file. The amount of data lost can be controlled by the JPEG quality settings function when saving your file in Photoshop. A high-quality JPEG can be an excellent compromise between file size and image dependability.

What should I know about image resolution measurements?

One of the most confusing aspects of desktop publishing and printing is resolution and the measurement of resolution. On our Web site, to minimize confusion for those new at this, we have consistently used PPI to refer to resolution, regardless of the image location or source. You may see other measurement acronyms (DPI, LPI and SPI) and wonder how they correlate. To clarify the terminology, here are definitions and explanations for each term.

PPI (pixels per inch) is how a monitor displays an image. How the image looks on the screen is determined by the resolution of the monitor (the number of pixels the monitor can display in a given area). Therefore the PPI is the display resolution, not the image resolution.

DPI (dots per inch) is probably the most familiar and most misused measure of resolution. It is not the resolution of scanned images, and it is not the measure of images on your monitor. DPI is the measure of how many dots of ink or toner a printer can place within an inch.

Most printers print the same number of dots horizontally and vertically. Basically a 600 dpi printer prints 600 tiny dots horizontally across one inch, and 600 tiny dots vertically up one inch.

SPI (samples per inch) is a measurement of image resolution when doing a scan, or using an image from a CD or digital camera.
Some scanning manufacturers use DPI in place of SPI in listing their scanners resolution capabilities. This is misleading because there are no dots in the image until it is actually printed.

When you're scanning photographic images, you need to keep in mind your final printing or output method. If you scan at too low a resolution and you find need to blow up your image in the software program you are using, you will end up with a lower quality image. On the other hand, using too much resolution results in wasted information and unnecessarily large file sizes.

LPI (lines per inch) is an important measurement related to the way Design Print Shop produces printed products. LPI is a standard offset printing term, and is dependent on the output device and the type of paper used for printing.
To simulate shades of gray using only black ink, a printer prints varying sizes and patterns of halftone spots (spots are made up of many dots of ink). Small halftone spots (fewer dots) create the visual illusion of a lighter gray while larger halftone spots (more dots) appear darker, and blacker.

The printer uses a halftone screen divided into cells. The cells contain the halftone spots. How close together the cells are in the grid is called lines per inch. This is the LPI, or line screen.

When printing in CMYK, the printer uses a different screen angle for each of the four colors. These separated colours are often called plates. Each plate prints at a different screen angle, and once all the plates are printed at different angles, the ink mixes together to create a seamless, smooth full-colour image.

The lower the LPI, the more obvious the halftone dots appear in the printed piece. Most laser printers (300 to 600 dpi) can only manage to print an LPI of 50 to 65 LPI, resulting in coarser image reproduction. High-resolution image-setters (like those at Design Print Shop) print at an LPI of 150 resulting in much smoother images comparable to photographs. As a reference, these image-setters print with a DPI of 3600!

Which file formats can my artwork be emailed to your team?

• - Adobe Photoshop Image (*.psd) (recommended) - PNG Image (*.png)
• - CorelDRAW Image (*.cdr,*.clk) - PostScript File (*.ps)
• - GIF Image (*.gif) - Windows Enhanced Metafile (*.emf)
• - JPEG Image (*.jpg,*.jpeg) - Windows Metafile (*.wmf)
• - Microsoft Publisher 2003 Document (*.pub)
• - Adobe Acrobat Document (*.pdf) (recommended)
• - Microsoft Office 2003 Document (*.doc,*.docx) - Adobe Illustrator Artwork (*.ai) (recommended)
• - PCX Image Document (*.pcx)
• - PICT Image (*.pic,*.pict,*.pct)
• - Bitmap Image (*.bmp)

How can I reduce the file size of the artwork I want to upload?

Our design team can do this for you at an additional cost. Please varies to each job, depending on how much work would need to be done. The minimum price starts at £5.

What are your shipping costs?

Shipping and processing costs vary by the weight of your order and by the turnaround time you select during checkout.

Which shipping methods do you use?

For deliveries within the UK we generally deliver via Royal Mail, DHL or My herms (If selected during check out)

Can I arrange for my own shipping provider/courier to deliver my order?

At this time we are not able to accommodate such an arrangement.