Professional Artists, here's what you need to know:

A graphic designed for full-color imprinting on a catalog or for use on a Web site may not be what’s required for Printing a T-Shirt or tote bag. Artwork is considered "ready" when it can be used for prepress and printing without the need for modifications that might incur extra charges or cause delays.

Following the sm@rt Artwork Guidelines Gives the best printing results, improves communication and incurs the lowest art cost. The use of sm@rt Artwork Guidelines ensure quick, clean imprints at an affordable price.

sm@rt Artwork Guidelines outline the requirements for specific types of electronic art files, as well as how to handle fonts, linked images and other important information.

While we can work miracles from a sketch on a cocktail napkin, our goal is to give you the results that you want and better. Art submitted by industry-advisable guidelines, helps us get you outstanding results with no (or minimal) art charges. The days of “camera-ready” being the standard are over and we would like to just say give us a “good” Illustrator or Photoshop file, but what follows are necessarily more detailed instructions. If any of this fine print needs further explanation, please contact us.

Our art depart is Macintosh based. any files created on pc  (Photoshop 7.0, Adobe Illustrator CS, QuarkXPress 5 and Freehand 8.0). should be saved in a cross-platform format (ie. eps, pdf etc) We accept Zip, Jaz, CD-ROM, and standard 3.5" disks. Please include file and color print out of art with disk. Text fonts must be included on disk with artwork or converted to curves/outlines.

In general, tell us what we are matching to (a painting, a card that was already produced, a color print that the customer saw, etc.) and give us a high-resolution file to work from and everybody will be happy.

Vector Artwork Files

• Submit all vector artwork in Macromedia Freehand  v.8.0 (or earlier) or Adobe Illustrator CS (or earlier).
• Must be saved in the Postscript Format and contain no Postcript errors.
• Submit files with all colors converted to spot, and all unused colors deleted from the document.
• All type that has been set must be converted to outlines (curves). If future changes to the text will be necessary, the original font file must be supplied with the art file for use on Mac.
• All line weight for design elements must be at least 1.0 pt at actual artwork print size.
• If the vector file contains any  raster images, these images must meet the  minimum requirement as stated in the Raster Artwork Files
• Do not apply any trapping to the image. If identical objects overlay one another precisely, please separate by layer.
• Use PMS numbers for color names.

Raster Artwork Files

• Submit all raster artwork in Adobe Photoshop CS or earlier as a .psd file.
• We cannot accept low resolution artwork such as images downloaded from the web. Simply opening these files and increasing the resolution will not produce useable artwork.
• All raster elements and art files must be sized to 100% or larger than the actual imprint size.
• Artwork containing any spot color elements or line art must be submitted at no less than 300 ppi.  Spot color artwork is best supplied in vector format.
• Submit all full color photographic and continuous tone files in RGB format.
• Continuous tone artwork must be submitted at no less than 200 ppi
• Text files, spot color or black & white illustrations and line drawings created or scanned into Photoshop require high resolution in order to maintain clean curves and crisp edges. Submit these files at no less than 300 ppi.

Page Layout/ Metafile Documents   

• Submit all page layout / metafile documents in Quark Express 5.0  or earlier as a .qxd file.
• Page layout documents must be prepared to render the artwork and all of its elements at 100% of actual imprint size.
• In addition to submitting the page layout documents, all vector and/or raster files that are referenced by the page layout document must also be included and must conform to quality standards as listed in Raster Artwork Files and Vector Artwork Files.
• Any fonts that were used in the production of the page layout document must be included in a Mac compatible format.

Acrobat (PDF) Files   

• PDF files created from vector files must retain the editing capabilities of the program that was used to create them (i.e. Illustrator® or Freehand®)
• Any placed raster elements must meet the minimum requirements in Raster Artwork Files above.
• Any placed vector elements must meet the minimum requirements Vector Artwork Files above.
• PDF files created from page layout documents should be submitted together with the source documents, fonts and all supporting files.

Fonts

Any fonts used in the production of art files should be converted to curves (outlines) prior to submission. If future typesetting will be required, the original font files must be included with the artwork file in a Mac compatible format.

Compression

Before sending any artwork file, you must use compression software to protect against damage in transit. Compression can make large files smaller to decrease the online transfer time, but the most important benefit is the way it encloses the delicate artwork files inside a file type that was designed for proper transmittal.

The two most popular compression formats are “.zip” and “.sit.” (Don’t confuse “zip” with the popular Iomega brand disks of the same name.)