Signage Education | Choosing A Graphic Designer

In wide format digital printing, your design and artwork will make a world of difference in the end result. Artwork that’s suitable for printing a brochure or business card may not be suitable for printing a large banner, or even a vehicle door magnet. An understanding of relevant concepts will save you time, money and frustration.

Customers frequently request a quote for digital signage indicating that they will provide production-ready art. As often as not, this begins an education process when they bring in a small bitmap image they want to have made into a banner. It’s not that the image can’t be printed large, we just can’t bring ourselves to do it for several reasons. First, it makes no sense to have a customer spend good money on a bad print. Second, a poorly designed banner yields a poor appearance, which reflects a poor image of my company, and the customer’s company. Perhaps most importantly, without the education of what artwork is suitable, the customer will likely assume the poor printed results are the sign company’s issue. Without an understanding, the customer may assume an image that looks good on a business card should look good on a banner.

If the concept doesn’t make sense, try looking at your business card under a loupe or magnifying glass. What you see under magnification is representative of what you would see when scaling an image to large sizes.

In the most extreme example, a logo was captured from a website. The image was intended for screen display, and as typical in websites, the image was a JPG, compressed. JPG compression is perfectly suitable for web pages because compressed image file is smaller – the web page displays quickly. There’s no magic to JPG compression however, the resulting image file is smaller because compression alters the image to make it more compact. Higher compression yields smaller files, and greater image degradation.

Tips For Best Results
In advance of having artwork created, consider how that artwork will be used. If signage is in the list of intended uses, check with your sign company in advance to save yourself headaches tomorrow. For example, if your sign will require that you provide vector art files, your graphic designer should be able to create vector art.

It’s always tempting to make use of an available design resource – both convenience and cost are appealing initially. Your neighbor’s best friend’s cousin may actually have applicable experience at affordable rates. There really isn’t a savings however if you must recreate your logo or artwork subsequently. If your graphic designer doesn’t ask you about the intended use of your design at the onset, consider finding another designer, and preferably, one with experience in the sign industry.

Most sign companies prefer vector based art over raster (bitmap) art, and for good reason. Vectors are concrete mathematical object descriptions. As such, scaling is also math. A vector image can be scaled to any size with no loss of image clarity. Vector art is readily converted to raster art at any size. Since vector art can be scaled, the file size is the same no matter what size is printed.

In comparison, raster art is a matrix (rows and columns) of dots (or pixels), each with a specific color. At the intended viewing distance, this matrix of dots looks like a photo image. This image matrix has a specific number of pixels. Increasing the size of the image increases the size of each pixel. When scaled significantly, each pixel is clearly visible, giving the image a jagged appearance. This jagged appearance can be reduced by adding more pixels, or “resampling”. But what color should be assigned to newly added pixels? The same color as the pixel to the left, to the right, or perhaps an average of the two? Simply put, resampling adds data (pixels and colors) that weren’t a part of the original image, which can result in a loss of image clarity.

While it’s true that raster images can be converted to vector to facilitate scaling, it’s not as accurate as converting vector to raster. Making a vector from a raster is similar to tracing. When starting with a low resolution image, the resulting vectors will have the same jagged appearance as extreme magnification of a raster image. The result of vector tracing is improved by starting with a higher resolution image. But if you have a high enough resolution image to begin with, a vector image may not be needed at all.

As a general rule, vector art is your best bet, though vector art is not an option for some types of art. Vector art is best suited to logos, text, gradients and solid colors. For photographic images, vector isn’t an option.

If vector art is not an option, target the resulting image size in relatively high resolution suitable for the intended product and size. Avoid JPG file formats if possible, and if used, favor higher quality over smaller file size to minimize image degradation. An image suitable for display on a monitor is typically 72 dots per inch. Your sign company’s printer is probably capable of printing 1440 dots per inch (DPI) – 20 times screen resolution. A reasonable resolution for a poster might be 300 dots per inch. A banner is typically viewed from a greater distance, so 100 DPI might be suitable.

When producing acceptable raster art for large images, file sizes will likely be too large for most email systems. For example, a 8′ x 3′ banner at 72 DPI could yield an image that’s greater than 60 megabytes. At 100 DPI, this could increase to 130 DPI. At 300 DPI, the image size could be well over a gigabyte. Your sign company will likely offer options for submitting your artwork that may include DVD, USB storage devices or an FTP site you can use to upload your artwork.

In advance of artwork creation, consider the intended use. If in doubt, your sign company can provide helpful advice to help you avoid disappointment and added cost to your project.

For more information, contact:

Spectrum Signs
23382 Madero Suite L
Mission Viejo, CA 92691
(949) 297-3800

Spectrum Signs