Signage Success, By Design

Implementing best practice is a big part of business success, and large-format printing is no exception. By following our best practice guidelines, you’ll get the best results from your artwork, the best results from us, and truly set your signage up for success. Here are five artwork essentials to help you on your way.

There are several things you need to know about images. Firstly, do you have the rights to use them in your specific application? Since most signage is meant to be seen by the public, make sure that this usage is permitted.

On the aesthetic side, think about how they will look when scaled up to the intended size, and how that relates to viewing distance. Details that you might not notice when designing on-screen – such as a reflection in a pair of glasses or an incongruous background detail – may become much more noticeable when printed at full size.

Image file formats matter too. While .jpgs typically have the smallest file sizes, they can show compression artefacts – typically ‘speckling’ around high contrast details, or in flat tints – which may become visible at large output sizes. Work with TIFF images if you can, and at the highest resolutions available. Anything less than 120dpi may show pixelation when printed and it’s usually best to turn off image downsampling when working at reduced artwork size for scaling on output.

The way that large-format print products are attached, mounted or supported also raises design and technical issues. As well as allowing for the position and space required for eyelets, pole pockets or drilled mounting holes, think about where the content of your design sits in relation to them.

We’ve all seen an ‘artwork fail’ where structural elements and design combine in amusing but unfortunate ways. Having part of a logo lost inside a roller banner base, an eyelet that looks like a pimple, or the CEO’s face stretched around a pole aren’t useful, even if they raise a chuckle. More practically, while punching a hole through the edge of a bleed photo might not matter, having it in the middle of your web address, QR code or phone number could prevent customers from finding you as easily as you’d like. At Venture Banners, we offer a range of templates for working with common fixtures that avoid these issues.

Colour is one of the trickiest areas. Your print artwork should always be supplied in CMYK, as this is most likely to give an accurate match when printed; RGB colours will be converted during the RIP process, however, if the artwork is colour-critical, you may very well be disappointed.

Digital printers can’t print Pantone colours directly because the use of specialist inks is not always practical in a production environment, but using CMYK approximation they can get close to many of them. You can use Pantones as special colours in your artwork, as long as they are embedded – but tell us which when placing an order and we can run some test prints to get the best match we can. Don’t create your own custom colours from CMYK recipes and name them after the Pantones they’re supposed to match.

When you want a really deep, rich black, use Pantone Process Black Coated. If you can’t access this directly in your artwork software, make a custom CMYK colour with 50% each of C, M and Y and 100%K. A single colour (K-only) black may not be satisfactory, even at 100% coverage.

Venture Banners can colour match from printed or other samples but this takes some extra time, as we’ll need to be sent a sample to work from. If you want to do this, we may also need you to sign off on a test print if a digital photo showing the original and the match isn’t felt to be reliable enough.

Some of the features that your design software adds automatically may be unnecessary, even counterproductive, in preparing artwork for large-format printing and they won’t always be obvious. Elements like crop marks, keylines and trim lines are often added automatically when generating PDFs for prints but aren’t usually needed and can cause problems. Crop marks are an element that aren’t necessary as each artwork should be on its own artboard which stores information for the trim box and bleed. Key lines and trim lines should be avoided altogether, unless your item needs to be cut to a bespoke shape. This will require a clearly visible cutting path to be included in your artwork file.

Another thing to avoid, which can be added accidentally, is overprint. This can be applied to text or graphic objects. It allows all the various ink percentages to print over each other when multiple coloured items are overlaid in the design, which can produce unwanted colour mixing effects or even prevent certain elements from being printed, for example if using white text set to overprint. Overprint can be detected, previewed and removed in Adobe Acrobat.

To ensure our fast turnaround times and highly competitive pricing, we can’t check artwork files or automatically provide proofs before printing, so it’s down to you to check your files thoroughly before submitting them. However, for anything obvious or any problems that we do notice, we will always make you aware prior to proceeding to print. 

In addition to working through the various considerations and parameters described in this blog, we recommend that you open your print-ready file and check it thoroughly before sending it to us. View it at 100% zoom, even if that means panning around large artworks, as this will give you a sense of the image quality and help spot any small errors, such as the misalignments, typos and layering mistakes that may be hard to spot on a screen but are only too visible on the finished print.

These are just some of the topics which are covered in more depth in Venture Banners’ Artwork Essentials: the Guide to Ensuring That Good Designs Become Great Signage. This detailed and comprehensive PDF guide to getting your artwork right can be downloaded here and will set you up perfectly for reliable, predictable and profitable large-format print buying.