GETTING STARTED WITH PORTFOLIO PRINTING
So, you want to create a portfolio book. Whether it’s a personal family, corporate, architecture, travel, photography, wedding, adoption, scrapbooking, or other kinds of portfolio books, it’s now time to think about how you want your portfolio book to look like. What kind of binding you want, paper type, and more are all important considerations to take into account when you create your portfolio book.
What is a Portfolio Book?
But first, what is a portfolio book? A portfolio book, is a a book that is design solely to showcase someones best work. Whether this is an architect, photographer, artist, or otherwise. They are mainly comprised of large photos or spreads in the book to showcase the best work in the most attractive way possible. They are often made with a hardcover or perfect bound binding type, because these are the most professional.
Difference Between Paperback Books and Hardcover Books
When making your decision on whether you should create your portfolio book in a paperback, or perfect bound, binding type instead of a hardcover binding type, below is a graph of the considerations of the similarities and differences between the two binding types.
How do I Print a Portfolio Book?
Printing with PrintingCenterUSA.com is fast, easy, and affordable. That extends to our portfolio printing too! The first thing that you are going to want to look at is what size and paper you want your portfolio book to be. We have a wide variety of standard sizes available:
Portrait Orientation:
| Landscape Orientation:
| Square Orientation:
|
If you don’t see a standard size that works for your portfolio printing project, you can also print a custom size. Just be sure that your custom portfolio book’s width and height is between 4″ – 12″.
Now onto the best paper for portfolio book printing. Our recommendation is to print your portfolio book with 100# Gloss Text. We have found that this paper works wonderfully well to make images pop and it will give your book an upscale, sharp, and appealing look with a higher-end feel. This shiny and lustrous coated sheet is excellent for full color printing and makes your best work stand out and look rich and beautiful. But don’t just take our word for it. You can order a free sample pack to be able to see and feel all of our paper options for yourself to find the perfect paper for your portfolio books.
We also offer the following paper options:
Gloss:
| Matte:
| Uncoated:
|
In an effort to make the printing process for your portfolio book as easy as possible, we offer a wide variety of blank and pre-designed templates for our customers to download. Our templates make it easy for your file specifications to be in-line with our PDF requirements. Not only that, but our templates come with built in safety, trim, and bleed lines, so that you are sure that the important information in your portfolio books are not going to get cut off. You can download templates for all Adobe Suite programs including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat. We offer regular and mailing templates for all of our folding options.
We also offer some pre-designed templates that can be created straight from our website. Simply choose what size you want to create, the template that matches your branding, and enter your text and images. Then you can check out straight from the design tool. It’s that easy!
What Else Do You Need to Know About Portfolio Book Printing?
Mailing Services
Did you know that you can mail your perfect bound books to your customers? All you have to do is provide your mailing list in a csv file. To send first class mail, we require a minimum of 500 pieces. For presort standard, we require an order of at least 200 pieces. If you are planning to mail your portfolio books, make sure that you leave enough room for the shipping address and stamp!
Designing Your First Portfolio Book
When you are in the process of designing your portfolio book, you want to create a great first impression with beautiful, high quality photos and content. Make sure that your image DPI is at least 300 or larger. This will ensure that your images print crystal clear. We recommend avoiding photos that are downloaded from an email or Facebook as these images are often compressed to be a DPI of 72, which is the standard DPI for digital images. Print requires a much larger DPI to be able to retain the same clarity. For more information on photo resolution, click here to read our blog post.
If you are using our online book design tool, and you get a red exclamation point when using a photo, avoid this photo. This is the design tool’s warning that the photo that you are trying to use is not high enough quality for that size of image you are trying to print. For more information on how to design your first portfolio book, read our blog post called ‘Steps to Making a Professional Custom Portfolio Book’.
Why Choose PrintingCenterUSA?
Full Color Printing
Our high-quality printing offers striking full color and classy black and white printing. We pride ourselves on being G7 certified, which means that we have color consistency across all of our printing devices. This is an industry-leading set of specifications that we have to uphold to maintain this certification.
Order Online
Save your online designs to your account, so it’s easy to update a book’s content. If you’ve already ordered with us, it’s easy to submit a re-order directly from your account page with the same files. We have optimized our website so that it’s incredibly user-friendly and our customer service team is available to help any time during business hours if you have any questions. You can contact our team at (800) 995-1555 or chat with us online by clicking the yellow chat icon in the top right corner of our website.
Customer Satisfaction Guarantee
We want to make sure that you are as happy with your printing project as we are, so we offer a customer satisfaction guarantee. If your order has defects in workmanship or materials within our control, we will reprint your order with its original order specifications once the claim has been processed and approved. For more information about our customer satisfaction guarantee, click here.
Now that you are an expert in portfolio book printing, get started by downloading one of our templates or upload your print-ready PDF!
