The usual state of business is typically “I need it the way I want it and I need it yesterday”. We’re all in a hurry and that doesn’t leave a lot of time for mistakes that need correcting. On the graphics end of business, many of the problems I run into are preventable on the front end, provided our clients understand what we need and why we need it.
Though you might be tempted to grab your company logo or great photo on your home page from the web to be set into a design for a printed piece, the truth is that very few (close to none) of the files that you can pull off a web page (72 pixels per inch) are going to have enough pixels for print work (250-300 pixels per inch). On top of that, part of putting images on the web means making the file size as small as possible. This means graphical compression in the form of jpeg or gif files which result in lower resolution and loss of detail when printed.
In other words, I’m begging you not to pull files from the web (or Word docs for that matter, though that’s another story)! If you find yourself hunting and hunting for that image you need to provide us with and the only one you can find is online, the end result will look like somebody made a mistake or didn’t know what they were doing. That’s not a reputation anybody wants!
The best thing you can do is spend some time before the rush is on, hunting down nice high-resolution files – usually someone on the marketing team will have them, or know where to get them. That will help your job run more smoothly and look a lot better. Just make sure that whatever image you provide is one that you have the legal right to use. That sounds like a good Topic #2!
