If you are designing a logo, a graphic or image that you would like to place on a banner, a sign, or any of our other products, you need to make sure that the art work is designed in a high resolution, a common mistake when designing art work is that it is produced in a resolution of 72 DPI (Dots Per Inch) and usually at a size of a couple inches in height, this is because that is the optimum resolution for displaying on your computer monitor.
However when you select that image and increase the size for it to fit on lets say a 36” x 48” banner, you are having to resize that image, to keep the math simple we will just say 20 inches, that means that we are increasing the size by 10 times its original size, so now instead of the image being 72 DPI it has now increased the size of the dot to 7.2 DPI, this makes those dots very noticeable, the key here is to have enough dots per inch to where the graphic will have smooth corners and curves.
An example of a high resolution and low resolution image
You can resize the image on a program like Photoshop and even have it increase the DPI, but what happens then is the program will guess as to what color pixels it will add to your image, this causes the image to look fuzzy and it looses detail. You want to try to have your image be at about 100 DPI after it has been resized. At this size it still has good detail and it will not look fuzzy.
The best solution however, when ever you designing a logo or an image, create it as a vector file, this is the best type of file because this consists of lines art instead of dots, this allows you to increase the size of your image without loosing quality it allows you to change colors in a very simple manner as oppose to a Raster image which makes it harder to manipulate the image. Documents with the following file extensions are typically vector format: .ai, .eps, .svg, .cdr.
If all you have is a low resolution file, don’t worry, all is not lost! We can convert most raster based images to vector. Simply contact us, and submit your art work for us to give you a quote on converting it to vector so that you can get your sign or banner produced.
