Help Your Designer, Help Yourself, Pt 2

Obtaining Images

This is the second of a three-part series called Help Your Designer, Help Yourself. This segment is all about images. Follow these guidelines and you will help yourself and your designer.

• Resolution: For print work, photos and other types of raster (pixel-based) images should be a minimum of 300 ppi at the actual size at which they will be printed. You may not know how large a photo will be used and you may not be able to check the resolution yourself. That’s OK! If you plan to send photos to your designer, obtain from your photographer the highest resolution photos possible. Your designer will let you know if there is an issue with the resolution. A photo can always be made smaller, while enlarging the photo only results in poor quality. If you plan to send a logo file, the best format is vector EPS (a resolution-independent file type), which is able to be scaled to any size without sacrificing resolution.
• Permission for use: If you are providing an image to your designer, be sure you have gotten any necessary permission to use it—unless it is your own or not protected by copyright, such as one from the public domain. You may also need to procure written consent from people, especially minors, who appear in the photograph. A credit to the photographer or source may or may not be required to appear with the image. Always convey this information to your designer.
• File types: Do not copy and paste images into a Word document. Send individual image files: PSD, TIFF, JPEG, AI or EPS. For web work or slide presentations, any format may be sent for images. If you have graphs or charts, these work best in their native format of Excel or Illustrator, or a PDF saved from Excel.
• File names: Clearly name any images you make reference to in your text document in order to make it easy for the designer to identify each one.