What are the best type of images to use on my banners?

The advancement of large format printing over the last decade has given us banner printers the ability to print more creative and ‘whizz-bangy’ banners. Gone are the days when vinyl letters were cut out and stuck onto a plain vinyl background, now we can print a whole rainbow of colours.

With this in mind I thought I would just write a short post on the best types of images to use on your banner, whether created by yourselves or to be sent through to us so we can do the design work for you.

JPG (or JPEG) Images

Probably the most popular file format on most people’s PCs, the JPG or JPEG format is a great file format for digital imagery as it allows for easy scaling down of images.

Beware though, this scaling down is not in size but in quality – ever noticed those ‘artifacts’ around parts of a photo, particularly around smooth contrasting areas like text.

If these artifacts are on an image used for a banner then they will also be printed. But please do also bear in mind that this may not affect the overall look of the banner when viewed from a distance.

TIFF Images

TIFF imagery is probably my preferred format for bitmap imagery (photographic imagery as opposed to illustrative imagery). It does also have it’s own compression as well (more commonly LZW) which is lossless – this means that the image quality remains the same but the file size is reduced. This makes TIFF images ideal for banners so that the entire image is preserved.

With TIFF and JPG imagery, it now just comes down to resolution, for further information on this, check out one of our previous posts on the best resolution for banner imagery.

Vector Images

Vector imagery is perfect for ANY size of print. Vector images are infinitely scalable so no matter what size artwork you have they will always appear as they were intended. If you have had a logo done by a professional company/individual then a vector version of the logo should have been provided. This will be in an .ai, .eps or maybe a .pdf format (although these may contain bitmap imagery and are not guaranteed to be vector-based), and ensures your logo looks perfect on all printed materials (although colour representation is another issue altogether).

This vector graphics article on Wikipedia may help to explain things further.

Hopefully this information will help the next time you come to order your Vinyl PVC Banners.

If you are looking to create your own artwork for banners, why not have a read through of the following:

• Blog article – Studio Time: Artwork Requirements Overview
• Venture Banners – Our Artwork Requirements