\nSo\n you have a good website and a Facebook page promoting your business, \nand then you realise that you need some business cards and letterhead \nwith your logo. You make them up and then when you get it printed the \nlogo is blocky and the text is hard to read. You may be wondering why \nthat is when the art looks so good on the website. Perhaps it is the \nnature of how modern marketing has gone but theses days most marketing \nmaterial is designed for use on the internet before it\u2019s \u2018fixed\u2019 to work\n in print. Jagged or blocky text. Colours that seem to change when \nprinted. Artwork that becomes grainy on the page. These are some of the \nissues that can spring up from such situation. So this month’s \ntechnical article will cover what are the common problems of artwork \ndesign for a computer screen and the ways you can try to fix it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now\n if the designer is good at their job, they will often create both \nonline and print ready versions at the same time. However that isn\u2019t \nalways the case. Maybe they are website builders and that\u2019s their focus \nso they aren\u2019t going to configure things to work for print. Maybe you\u2019ve\n one of those one shot designers of a site like \u2018Fiver\u2019 who will give \nyou a great logo when you look at it on screen but the minute you print \nit, the flaws in the design will become obvious. So what are the common \nissues that can occur and how do you fix them<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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This\n boils down to the natural resolution of the two systems. Computer \nscreens work at 72dpi while print is 300dpi or over 16 times the number \nof dots in a square inch. So when the graphic is printed the printer has\n to use 16 print dots to replicate the same screen dot, resulting in the\n blockiness. If the designer can\u2019t supply you a print ready version of \nthe graphic, a quick fix is getting a graphics program and using the \nscale option to enlarge it. Set the image size to the measurements you \nneed and set to best quality for the conversion. The result will lose \nsome of the sharpness of the original but it will still be usable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Companion\n to the smooth screen blocky print problem is that because computer \nscreens have a quarter of the resolution to what is expected to be \nacceptable in print. If you set the image to good print quality you find\n it shrinks to quite a small size. A rough rule of thumb to get good \nprint quality from a computer image, is that for every it takes 10 \npixels for 1mm in size. So that \u2018massive\u2019 850 x 250 pixel website header\n is will only look good at 85 x 25mm of size or roughly half the size of\n a business card. Now to get around this, good image software will also \nallow you to increase the dpi (the number of dots) of an image as part \nof the enlargement process. We recommend setting it to 300dpi but you \ncan get away with 200dpi if the image comes out a bit noisy or grainy at\n the 300 setting<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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This\n is a sign that the designer has a jpeg for the text or used some form \nof image compression. Jpegs aren\u2019t designed to handle text and so show \nhow bad they are at it when printed. In other case its because there is \nonly so many pixels to work with and when they are enlarged the program \ncan\u2019t smooth the hard edges so we get \u2018steps\u2019 instead.In many cases it\u2019s\n better to cut your losses and replace the problem areas with plain \ntext. If the text is over a image, you might be able to find the \noriginal image and put a new text over that instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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That\u2019s\n an ongoing problem for us printers and in fact I\u2019ve covered this in \nseveral articles before. And the reasons why can be complex but the most\n common reason is, because you are looking at reflected light coming off\n the page instead of projected light coming from a screen everything \nwill be 5-15% darker. The simplest solution is either have us print \neverything slightly lighter, or just play with the brightness and \ncontrast of the image when you\u2019re setting up your design and make it \njust a bit lighter than what you expect it to be<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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This one is a problem that\u2019s a little harder to fix and we have covered in articals<\/a>\n before but it boils down to that a lot of programs will working RGB of \nscreens while print is CMYK. While our print systems are designed to \ncompensate for the difference in how colours are made using RGB, it \nisn\u2019t perfect and can be slightly inaccurate. The limits of print \ntechnology means that we also can\u2019t blend colours as finely as can be \ndone on computer screens so some modification will happen. If it\u2019s a \nreally big issue then the best thing to do is to contact us directly and\n we can help you come up with a modified version of image that will work\n better in print.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Another\n side effect for designing for the screen first. To get around the \nlimits of the resolution the designer will have the edges of the images \nblur slightly to smooth over the blockiness of the pixels. On the higher\n resolution of the print, these blending pixels become more obvious as \nthey are scaled up and the colour steps become a less smooth. The use of\n the image enlargement with increase dpi will help average out some of \nthese problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of\n course these are not complete fixes, more just a \u2018get it okay for now\u2019 \nsolution. The best process is to have the logos set up in a variety of \nformats and sizes so you have them ready for every situation from screen\n printing t-shirts, doing brochures, to signwriting your vehicle. If you\n have problems getting this sorted, why not talk to us at Copy Express \nand we can take care of it for you.<\/em><\/p>\n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So you have a good website and a Facebook page promoting your business, and then you realise that you need some business cards and letterhead with your logo. You make them up and then when you get it printed the logo is blocky and the text is hard to read. You may be wondering why … Continue reading “Resolution – Why your website logo will look horrible in print and how to fix it”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":493,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[97,76,96],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":941,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492\/revisions\/941"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Images and text have an outline of a slightly different colour
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