Get great looking trade banners

Make sure you provide perfect print-ready artwork for PVC vinyl banners

PVC vinyl trade banners are an ever-popular form of large format, big impact advertising. They’re commonly used both inside and out (although we hope you had all of your outdoor banner advertising well secured this week). Fortunately, the extreme weather that battered our shores recently is an extremely rare occurrence in Ireland and many businesses use banners outdoors as part of their marketing mix or even for one-off events.

Designers know that large format print products such as trade banners have slightly different artwork requirements than smaller print like booklets and leaflets. One of the main differences is the kind of images used in artwork.

Vector is always best where possible

When working in Indesign and Illustrator, both of which are industry standard platforms for graphic designers, you’ll be working with vectors. Shapes and text will both be created and output as vector graphics. Vectors are made up of lines that remain sharp and do not lose quality when they’re enlarged. That’s great for banner artwork that can be up to several square metres in size. When you outline text it remains as a vector but when you bring a vector into Photoshop it will ask you if you want to import as pixels or as a smart object. Using the smart object option allows you to keep the imported graphic or text as a vector although you will need to convert it to pixels (or “rasterise” it) if you want to use Photoshop’s filters and effects.

Raster images or pics
Photographs are made up from pixels and saved as jpegs, tiffs and pngs. These are all raster images and will lose quality and look blurred when enlarged. For digital print all images should be at a resolution of 300 pixels per inch at the size they’ll appear in print. However, for large format print such as trade banners, it’s not always practical to have images of this resolution as their file size will be extremely large and difficult to work with at artwork size. Also, banners are seen from a much greater distance than smaller digital print products so the resolution of images can be significantly less.

It’s accepted that the human eye can’t see more than 8000 pixels across a person’s field of view. Therefore if your artwork is 8000 pixels and 100 inches across the eye will pick it up at 80 dots per inch. That means that for an artwork of this size your image can be 80, not 300 pixels per inch. This is a good rule of thumb to use. Simply divide the pixel size by the number of inches to get your final DPI. Anything over 80 DPI is usually fine for a large format vinyl banner but if you’re in doubt about your image size, ask your printer.

At TradeDigitalPrint.ie we supply a full large format print service to our trade customers as well as a full range of digital print products. Our high definition large format presses produce rich, bright colours and superb large format image reproduction. Our state of the art website allows trade customers to get instant quotes, upload artwork, order and arrange delivery online. There are superb trade prices, exclusive offers and rewards. We built a reputation for excellence in print quality, service and reliability. We’re based right here in Ireland so you can contact us at any time and ask us about your job. To order your trade banner, see our full product range or to find out more about the benefits of working with Ireland’s leading online digital trade print company, visit www.TradeDigitalPrint.ie or contact our specialised trade print team today.