Thursday, May 04, 2006

Graphic Requirements from your Favorite Printer...

Have you ever felt like Charlie Brown when he answers the phone and here's the wa wa wa wa wa wa on the other end. Well , we are constantly being wa wa'd (scolded) by our favorite printer, Simon. Simon like all of us lives in the age of time poverty where we are constantly trying to shave time from our regular activites to make time for other activities. This is especially important when it comes to large scale printing graphics.
In order to do so in the most time effective way, we've found a few proven methods to uploading graphics to the printer. One should save their graphics as a tiff as opposed to psd, jpeg, eps, etc. Reason being, tiff files saved in LZW compression act more like a zip file and take less time to render. This as Simon will attest to means the time it takes for him to open and render/transfer the image to the screen is cut sometimes in half.
Further, when you are sending large format files always attach a pdf version of the file so your favorite printer can eyeball the product to make sure the tiff matches up correctly with the pdf. If you have any PMS colors which are embedded in the graphic attach a smaller file to inform the printer that matching needs to happen for this particular file. I'm sure there were a few points missed which Simon will fill you in on as soon as he responds to this article.

Well, as stated above time is of the essence so I bid you adue.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Scolded is such a harsh word! I would say more like advised. I also say it as to help cause less errors in the overall production of the graphics. The "boys" over at smashhit do a good job in getting files over to us. Since the email formula I gave them, we have less questions for them. I would say the word now is "streamlined". Keep it up dudes!