Tips For Selecting, Saving And Printing Artwork

For today’s Feature Friday, Promotional Consultant Today shares Part 3 in an artwork education series from the June issue of PCT‘s sister publication, Promotional Consultant digital magazine. In this series, production artwork expert Dane Clement answers some of the most common artwork questions.

Why can’t I take images of my clients’ logos off their websites?

Often customers will send an image of a logo they pulled from a website to me thinking it can be used as is for reproduction. I always have to send it back and explain that it won’t work.

Logos taken from websites are usually saved as .jpg, .png or .gif files at low resolutions. These file types are not vector files but raster files and, as was discussed in my previous article in this series, cannot be enlarged without the image becoming severely distorted.

The extra time needed to recreate the logo can end up costing your customer more money, so it’s always good to explain to your customer why logos from websites won’t work and to try and get the best file possible up front.

Is there a standard or acceptable image or file size? What if the file size is larger than 10 megabytes and cannot be e-mailed? Can I easily reduce the file size?

There isn’t a standard or acceptable image or file size because so many things can affect the size of the file, and it all depends on what you are printing and what is required by your printer. The file size for a four-foot-by-eight-foot banner is going to be a lot larger than a file for a one-color vector image. So the best thing to do in the beginning is check with the customer to see what is expected for the artwork. What will it be used for and how big will it be? Then check with the printer to see what kind of artwork specifications it requires to reproduce the image. Does the image need to be actual size? What resolution does the image need to be? What file format do you require–tiff, pdf, jpeg? All of these things will determine what the file size will be in the end, and by getting this information up front, you’ll be able to set up your artwork to the proper specifications without going overboard.

For more tips on artwork files, read the complete article in the June issue of Promotional Consultant digital magazine.

Source: Dane Clement is well-known for his expertise in computer graphics and color separations. He is the president of Great Dane Graphics, vice president of GroupeSTAHL Creative and has authored T-Shirt Artwork Simplified books for Adobe and Corel users.