Artwork Guidelines

While we do offer full service graphic design you may have have your artwork already prepared. But is it production ready? These guidelines will help you understand what is required to be truly production ready.

Providing us with your artwork in an appropriate format is extremely important to producing high-quality prints, vinyl graphics, and screen prints. The following information explains how to provide artwork in the correct format for the best possible results.

Acceptable & Preferred File Formats

Please only include what you want to have printed. Please do not include extra white space, artwork instructions or anything else that you do want produced. You can send art instructions or layouts or any additional information in a separate file.

Adobe Illustrator Files – .AI and (Encapsulated Postscript).EPS

An AI (Adobe Illustrator) file is the original, editable working file. EPS files are also acceptable. Be sure to convert all text to outlines and make sure that there are no raster images included in the file. If you do not know how to do this or you did not create the original file, we will do this.

.PDF Portable Document Format – Vector Only

PDF format is a very popular format as it can be viewed on any computer with Adobe Acrobat. It is also possible to preserve Illustrator and EPS editing capabilities when saving to this format. This means it can be opened and modified in the same way an AI file can.

Unacceptable File Formats

These files are not useable without proper adjustments.  These file formats generally require an extensive amount of art time and will be charges accordingly.

.CDR Corel Draw

We do not utilize Corel Draw. If your artwork was designed in Corel Draw please save the file as a EPS or PDF.

.JPG, .PNG, .GIF, .PSD, TIFF

These are raster images. Unless the images are very high resolutions these files require an excessive amount of design time to recreate.

.Doc, .XLS, .PPT

These files types are good to use to provide art instructions but are not useable for printing.

Vector Versus Raster

Vector Format

Unlike a raster file, vector files such as AI or EPS files can be scaled to any size and not lose quality. This is because it is built from precise, mathematical points rather than using pixels. 

Raster Format

Raster images are formed small square dots called pixels. As you increase the size of a raster image it becomes blurred and pixelated and will have jagged edges. This is why a vector format provides the best result.

A Note About PSD and TIFF Files

While we prefer to utilize vector format files, there are instances where we will use Adobe Photoshop (PSD) and TIFF files. While they are raster based, high quality PSD’s and TIFFS are often used for complex and detailed images and photos. If you have your file prepared as a high resolution PSD or TIFF we recommend that you contact us so we can discuss the options together.