Is your deck print-ready? The three checks that save your print run
The saddest post in any deck-creator community is the box-opening that went wrong: five hundred decks, blurry. The good news is that almost every printing disaster is one of the same three file problems, and all three are checkable before you spend a cent.
1. Resolution: the 300 DPI rule
Printers lay down 300 dots per inch. A standard tarot card is 2.75 × 4.75 inches, so your art needs to be at least 825 × 1425 pixels, for the final card, not your canvas-with-margins. If you painted at a bigger size, wonderful: never upscale, only down.
The trap: art that looks razor-sharp on a phone screen at 400 pixels wide. Screens are forgiving; ink is not.
2. Bleed: the margin the cutter eats
Cutting machines wobble by a millimeter or two. If your art stops exactly at the card edge, some cards in every run will show a hairline of white. Bleed is the extra strip of art past the trim line that the cutter can eat safely. Most tarot printers want about 0.12 inches per side, so a full-bleed file is around 897 × 1497 pixels.
If your borders matter to you (and in tarot they usually do), bleed is not optional.
3. Aspect ratio: 2.75 to 4.75, exactly
If your file's proportions don't match the card's, the printer will either crop your art or letterbox it, both without asking. Check that width ÷ height is very close to 0.579. A square export or an A4-proportioned scan will not survive contact with a tarot template.
The boring checklist
- Every card at least 825 × 1425 px (ideally 897 × 1497 with bleed)
- All cards the same dimensions (mixed sizes print as a mess)
- Aspect ratio 2.75:4.75 within a couple of percent
- PNG or high-quality JPEG, sRGB color
- A card back file (every printer requires one)
- One physical proof deck ordered before any real run
Foolmade runs all of these checks automatically the moment you upload a card, against real pixels, not the DPI number your export dialog claims. But whether you use us or a ruler and a calculator, run the checks. Your future box-opening post deserves to be a happy one.