The last decade has seen a lot of storms. Hurricane Katrina and Charley to the more recent tornadoes throughout the Midwest, violent weather has been a constant reminder how vulnerable we can be. All this weather activity has spawned a decade of reforms and changes in the municipal codes that govern advertising displays in front of businesses. Many cities now put a time limit on how long banners, signs, pennants and flags can be displayed in front of a business. And an application for a permit for each one of those can be required. A lot of cities are cracking down on their ordinances and visits from your friendly Code Enforcement Officer are common. Be aware of your local ordinances before you spend time and money on buying advertising signs, banners and flags. Even pennant strings are being legislated and controlled. Use your search engine to find your City Ordinances, or call your local Code Enforcement agency to see what the laws are for your area BEFORE you buy. An informed consumer is a thrifty consumer.

Question: Why can’t you print the rich, vibrant color I see on my screen?

The RGB color you see on your screen is controlled by 256 levels of brightness for each color (Red, Green, and Blue). So, you have nearly 17 million potential colors available (256 x 256 x 256). With CMY (Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow), you have only 100 levels of brightness available with each color (1%–100%), so you end up with only 1 million potential colors available (100 x 100 x 100). So RGB has a ton more color options in its range (or gamut) than CMY does. Artwork that is produced on a computer in RGB mode needs to be converted to CMY(K) before it can be printed. (Black [K] is added to CMY to produce greater detail and richer blacks than can be achieved by CMY alone.) So in the conversion process from RGB to CMYK, there is a necessary color shift that takes place. This unfortunately results in colors that are more muted and less vibrant than what you see on your screen. It is simply not possible to reproduce many of colors that you can see on your monitor because they lay outside of the possible color range of CMYK. (Also, there are some colors in the CMYK range that cannot be represented in RGB on a computer monitor.)

Feel free to produce your art in RGB mode, but we recommend that you convert it to CMYK before sending it to us so that you can see the color shift and how the colors will most likely turn out when printed. This will reduce surprises and disappointment, especially if you are counting on a certain color that cannot be produced by the CMYK printing process.

Oftentimes we receive art that is very low in resolution, and customers do not understand why we can’t enlarge it to the size it needs to be. Or, they start with low resolution art and simply increase the pixels per inch in an image editing program and think this should make the art acceptable for use.

Unfortunately, with pixel-based images, you cannot add sharpness to an image by increasing its resolution, and you can’t take low resolution art and enlarge it and expect that it will look fine at the finished print size.

When printing vinyl banners, we prefer provided art to be 100 pixels per inch (ppi) at 100% (actual size). If the art we are provided is less than this and is enlarged to full size, the results can be less than optimal. The image below shows the difference between an image that was too small and needed to be enlarged 600% (left), and one that needed no enlargement, being prepared correctly at 100 ppi at 100% (right). You can see that the added pixels to the low res image has fuzzed the stair-stepped edges, and the image lacks detail and sharpness. The image on the right is crisp and sharp and will contribute to a superior finished product.

On the flip side, if the image on the right was supplied to us at 600 ppi at 100%, it would not make it superior to the same image at 100 ppi. Because of the limitations of the print process, and the amount of detail the eye is able to see at the viewable distance, the added resolution will not be perceived or helpful. All it will do is bloat file sizes and increase upload/download times.

So, providing art at sufficient resolution will save time (jobs won’t be held up as we wait for good art to be provided) and result in a quality finished product that you will be proud to display.

Do you find yourself recreating someone else’s logo or artwork but can’t seem to figure out what font was used? A very useful tool for the iPod, iPhone and iPad is called WhatTheFont. I just used this app while recreating a customer’s logo and it identified the font name in seconds after downloading the app. This saved me an hour of scouring the font books to come to the same conclusion. The font was Van Dijik which put it at the back of those font books. Hey, it’s FREE and even if it doesn’t work all the time, it still will save you enough time to pay for itself. Here’s a cool article to read. You don’t have to have an iAnything to use the WhatTheFont service. This article talks about that and some other cool resources.

Welcome to the blog for Grand Format Printers. Our posts will be dedicated to the processes and practices of using Grand Format Printers. Specifically for the Custom Banners, Custom Flags, and Vinyl Banners industries. This blog was created as an online resource. Not a sales tool. Feel free to comment and share as we go along. Thanks for reading.