Guides from actual design work.

Who these are for

Every guide here comes out of client work rather than research: brand identity, packaging, social media and print production, which is where the questions in them actually arose. They assume you are making something for someone else and that the result has to survive contact with a printer, a platform's compression, or a client who will open the file in software you did not choose.

That focus means they are practical rather than comprehensive. A guide on preparing artwork for print explains bleed, colour mode and resolution because those are what go wrong; it does not attempt to cover the whole of prepress. If you are looking for the shortest path to not making an expensive mistake, that is the level they are pitched at.

The mistakes they exist to prevent

Four problems account for most of the trouble in this kind of work, and there is a guide for each. Colour that looks right on screen and wrong in print, because RGB and CMYK cover different ranges and vivid screen colours have no printed equivalent. Images that go soft after upload, because a platform re-compressed a file that was already too large or too small for the slot it went into. Artwork trimmed with a white edge, because it was supplied without bleed. And a logo delivered as a single PNG, which leaves the client unable to use it at a different size, on a dark background, or on anything going to print.

None of these are difficult to avoid once you know they exist. All of them are expensive to fix afterwards, and the last one in particular is what separates a professional handover from an amateur one.

How they relate to the tools

Where a guide reaches a point a tool here can handle, it links to it — the contrast checker, the image resizer, the palette generator. The guides are the reasoning and the tools are the execution, and either works without the other. Nothing in them is written to push you towards a tool, and where the right answer is software this site does not have, they say so.

Why these exist

The tools on Quezlo each do one job and explain that job on their own page. These guides are the other half: the decisions around the job, which no calculator can make for you. Whether a brand colour will survive being printed, how much bleed a leaflet needs, why an image looks soft after upload — these are the questions that come up in real projects, and the answers are the kind you normally learn by getting it wrong once.

They are written from working practice rather than assembled from other articles, which means they are opinionated in places and admit uncertainty in others. Where a guide touches on something a tool here can do, it links to it — but the guide stands on its own, and none of them exist to sell you anything.