Sending Artwork For Your Banners

On a daily basis we can receive hundreds of individual artworks for banners, foamex, roller banners, plus anything else we do. This can amount to a lot, in terms of file sizes, being transferred across the internet for us to use.

Sometimes, depending upon the file format the artwork has been saved as, the print files can be in excess of 100MB. We have had some larger than 1GB before now, which has proven tricky. Although saving the artwork as a PDF can generally help this – if you would like to know more on artwork guidelines, we have just the page for you.

Unfortunately, email is not the ideal platform for sending large attachments. Email was originally developed as a digital messaging system, primarily for text-based use. But as its use is the main form of digital communication on the internet, it is seen as the most obvious way to transfer files as well… but this has its problems.

I am no techy when it comes to emails but I have been told by IT-friends that email attachments can ‘bloat’, doubling their size! Other problems can be file corruption, where the file is unusable by the time it has reached the other end.

Due to the fact that we receive a ridiculous amount of artwork every day, we have had to reduce our mailbox capacity to prevent large attachments coming through. If an email is too large for our inbox, it will be rejected by our server and depending on the senders server set-up they will get notified of the rejection, or, as is often the case, not.

We do say not to send any attachment over 1MB, but in truth, 4/5MB can be sent but we cannot guarantee it will be received.

There are ways around this problem, but the predominant ones seem to be either online file transfer services or your own FTP server.

If you have your own FTP server we can gratefully receive artwork on these, all we would need are log in details and we will be able to download the appropriate artwork (please do let us know the file name and file path if there are multiple artworks/folders available).

The dedicated file transfer sites work on the basis that you upload the artwork to them and then they send a link to the file which can be downloaded to the recipient. They can then download the file at their leisure.

We do provide an artwork upload facility with YouSendIt, but since it has been updated we have found that it does not work in Google Chrome! Please, don’t ask us why, we have absolutely no idea how they have allowed this to happen. This is why we are looking at an alternative which we hope to implement soon.

There are other facilities such as MailBigFile as well which also offer a similar service for sending large files. Or you can try dropsend.com or ge.tt

One final way to send files is Dropbox. This is an amazing facility which has numerous uses. One way is to share files with other Dropbox accounts or to send links to files for people to download. If you are a Dropbox account holder and would like to know how to share your files with non-Dropbox holders by just sending a link to the file, check out their help section which is, err, very helpful.

So to summarise:

Artwork + Email = Unhappy inbox and possible missed order

Artwork + FTP = Happy Venture Banners People

Artwork + File Transfer Facility = Happy Venture Banners People

Any other artwork sending recommendations are welcome, please do get in touch.