4M

A client and good friend of mine recently did an awesome marketing campaign. She’s a top-producing realtor on the East Coast and she appeared at a community event. She printed up brochures and fancy raffle tickets with her logo on them and sold them to benefit a local charity, with the prize being a yacht cruise. The winner of the raffle was announced on her blog - thereby drawing traffic to her blog. Brilliant! I sure wish I could take credit for that idea.

Anyway, she recently wrote me wondering about how to handle images for print and for web. This is a pretty complicated issue, so instead of answering by email I decided to make it into a blog post.

She asks:

I made some adjustments to the image you sent me when I did the battle of the bands promotion and sent it to a printer to be printed, but after several hours of resending adjusted images so they’d bleed, dpi, etc, I cancelled the order. The original printing I did at staples wasn’t great quality paper. Do you have a printer you like? Also, I notice when I send you
stuff, it’s not in the correct format, either. Can you educate me on how to send you an image in a way you can adjust it productively???

There is no easy answer to your question because it all depends on the fate of the image. As a bit of background, it’s important to know that print and web are two completely different environments, with different ways of handling color and displaying images in dots of ink vs. pixels of light … whatever. Then you’ve got two different ways of rendering an image - pixel by pixel (also known as raster) vs. lines, curves and mathematics (also known as vector.)

Okay. So what does all that junk mean?

It means you have to plan how you are going to use the image you are creating. If you are going to print something like a sign or business cards that has text, logos and illustrations, you are generally going to be working in a vector program like Illustrator, using CMYK color, at 300dpi. If you are creating something for the web, you might be using a raster program like Photoshop, using RGB color, at 72ppi.

If you are creating something multi-purpose, you have to make some choices. The color doesn’t matter too terribly much as long as you don’t expect perfect color matching between print and screen. You always want to be working at a higher resolution, so go for 300dpi and you can downsize later to minimize file size on the web. Remember, when it comes to image quality, you can always go down, but you can never go up. Whether you use Photoshop or Illustrator is not all that important and mostly depends on what you are creating. When manipulating photographs or doing pixel-painting, it’s all about Photoshop; Illustrator, on the other hand does text and drawing extremely well. You can place Illustrator files within Photoshop and vice versa, and as the versions mature the capabilities of the two programs begin to overlap somewhat.

Okay, let’s say you’ve made all these decisions and created your final masterpiece. Then the time comes when you need to hand the file over to a print vendor or your favorite web goddess. (That would be me!)
If you are dealing with a printer, you need to give them the Illustrator file in a nice zipped package along with any copies of any special fonts you have used, Photoshop files or tiffs you placed inside your drawing, etc. In general you probably want to convert your text to outlines to avoid any font problems. You may need to save the file as a .eps file, which is in the language that the physical printer understands. You can also give them a .pdf file. They generally all have guidelines about how they want their files and are happy to answer questions that avoid them headaches on the press.

For web use, if it’s a logo or other drawing, an Illustrator file is ideal because I can resize that up to billboard size or put it on any color backround with no loss in image quality. If it’s a photograph, the original, uncropped, unresized, un-messed-with, high resolution, hot from the camera image is generally what I want, and then I can work my magic from there.
If it’s a combination of a logo, a photograph, some text and a layout for a web page, you should give me a jpg of the whole thing and then give me the separate elements separately. The text should be unformatted in a plain text program (NOT MICROSOFT WORD) or an email, the logo as a .ai or .eps, the photo as a tiff or high-quality jpg. If you put the whole thing together in Photoshop, it doesn’t hurt to give me that layered Photoshop file too. You can zip all these things together in a nice neat little package, or upload them, or email them, or whatever. Just get them into my hot little hands and I’ll take it from there.

Hope that answers your questions…
and if not,

I’m here to help.
~m

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 6:47 pm and is filed under Marketing, Life on the internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.