Graphic Design

From CD Covers to Large Posters, Engine Room Audio offers a full service graphic design department. Our graphic designers are experts in music marketing and presentation, ready to convey your musical concept to your audience. You can provide Engine Room Audio with your artwork, or take advantage of our talented professionals.

Below are the instructions for Short Run and Long Run/ Off-Set Printing Projects, along with the instructions for submitting necessary files to our staff of designers so that we can help you create your final design.  Please read and follow these instructions very carefully.  If your art is not set up properly many problems can arise such as missing fonts, color variations, and pixilated images.  Please feel free to call or e-mail our staff at any time if you have difficulties with any of our templates or have any questions.

How to Prepare Your Graphics:

Are we creating your design for you?

Many clients prefer to have our design staff execute their project ideas.  Using our design staff ensures that your project will be set up properly and our years of experience in the design field mean that a wealth of creative ideas will be available to you.  We work with each customer via phone and/or e-mail to ensure that every detail is correct.  Using your provided images and ideas we can customize your project to suit your needs. We provide you with free PDF proofs and no project ever goes to print without your approval. View a few of our CD Cover project samples below.

If you would like for our staff to assist in your project design, we request
the following:

  • All images that you would like to be included in your project should be submitted via disk, e-mail, or our ftp server at a resolution of at least 300dpi.
  • If your images need to be scanned by our staff and converted to digital files, that process will be included in your hourly design fee.
  • Please provide all text for your project (lyrics, credits, thank you’s etc.) in a text file (Microsoft Word, Text Edit, etc) and proofread before submitting. 
  • If you have specific ideas about your design or examples of other projects that you would like our staff to emulate, please feel free to provide those as well!

Are you supplying your own design?

We understand the economics of creating a CD/DVD project, however, we discourage those not familiar with design and set up from supplying their own design.  If you are an experienced graphic designer, or can work with an experienced designer, then by all means, go to town!  However, if you are working with these graphic design programs for the first time, there is usually a high risk of print issues, not to mention a great big learning curve.

That said, if you feel confident that you or your designer can properly set up and execute your project here are the guidelines that we suggest you follow.  Again, if you have difficulties with any of our templates or have any questions, please feel free to call or e-mail our staff.

Short Run Projects vs. Long Run/Off-Set Printing

“Short Run Projects”

In general, projects with a piece count of less than 1000 are manufactured “in house” at our New York office.  These projects are considered “Short Run”.  We use the highest quality CDR duplicators and Digital Off-Set printing to complete these projects.  In addition, our on-disk printers are capable of high resolution, one-color and full-color thermal printing.  There are many different options for your short run project from colored disks to clear vinyl sleeves, so be sure to check with your sales associate for pricing and clarify which products you will be using before proceeding with your design.

Templates for short run projects can be found here.  These templates are available in psd, pdf, and eps formats for both Mac and PC.  Call 212-625-3467 if you are unable to download the templates and we will happily e-mail you the files that you need or send you a CD-R.

Short Run designs not supplied in the proper Engine Room Audio Templates may be subject to an additional prep charge of up to $75.00.  We will carefully check your art and let you know if your provided design does not meet our specifications.  We will make minor adjustments if necessary at no cost and send PDF proofs to your or your designer before printing.

Acceptable files for Short run printing include the following:

All images should be CMYK or Grayscale with a resolution of at least 300dpi.

• QuarkXPress
• Illustrator
• Photoshop
• InDesign
• High-resolution pdf, eps, tiff and jpeg files.

Long Run/Off-Set Printing

Long Run/Off-Set Printing projects usually include any Replication project or project over 1000 pieces.  These projects are manufactured at our plant and include glass mastered audio disks, silkscreen disk printing and off-set paper printing.  Due to the nature of the printing processes used in Long Run Printing, there are different templates necessary for proper execution of your project.

Templates for Long Run projects can be found here. These templates are available in Quark, Illustrator, InDesign and some Photoshop formats for both Mac and PC.  Call 212-625-3467 if you are unable to download the templates and we will happily e-mail you the files that you need or send you a CDR.

Long Run designs not supplied in the proper Engine Room Audio Templates will be subject to an additional prep charge of $75.00.  We will carefully check your art and let you know if your provided design does not meet our specifications.  Please carefully check your art before submitting for typos, color conversions and bleed.  Once art has been submitted to our plant for printing, adjustments to the files will require additional costs and add time to your order.

Acceptable files for Long Run/Off-Set Printing include the following:

All images should be CMYK or Grayscale with a resolution of at least 300dpi.

• QuarkXPress
• Illustrator
• InDesign
• Photoshop*

*When providing your design in Photoshop files, please be aware that this program is not designed for Off-Set printing and text or detailed design elements may appear pixilated or jagged on your final project.  We suggest using a layout program such as Quark, Illustrator, or InDesign to place text and smaller, detailed images and only provide image files in Photoshop.

Color Matching

For Short Run printing we will do our best to match the specific colors of your design, however, because neither the thermal disk printing nor the Digital Off-Set are capable of Pantone color matching, there may be variations or differences in your files and the finished product.  The best way to ensure that your final product is closest to the colors you want, is to both provide a color proof for our staff to “match” and to approve an actual printed version of your project, or a “Hardcopy Proof”.  Depending on the complexity of your project, a “Hardcopy Proof” may be subject to a set up fee of up to $75.00.

For Long Run printing, we are able to match specific Pantone colors both on the silk-screened disk and the off-set paper.  Pantone colors must be specified in your provided design files and separated in your files.  You will receive PDF proofs for your disk and paper, but be aware that depending on the calibration of your computer monitor, the color of the final print may be dramatically different from the color on your screen.  To ensure exact color matching, request a “Hardcopy Proof” of your paper art.  Unfortunately, in the screen printing process for the disk, the only way to ensure your disk art matches exactly is to pull a disk directly from the press.  Disk proofs are printed in CMYK and because the silkscreen process is dramatically different than the CMYK printing process, your final disk art may vary in color.

Fonts

Please supply all fonts used in your project (plain, bold, italic, etc.)  PostScript fonts have a printer file and a screen font file.  TrueType fonts have only one file.

If you are supplying flattened images with embedded fonts, providing fonts will not be necessary.  However, be aware that we will be unable to edit or modify any flattened files or embedded fonts.