We love making signs and plaques uniquely yours, and we hate charging an arm and a leg to do it.
We often receive artwork or ideas from clients who desire a personalized custom sign, but send artwork and files that we just cannot use. This is both disappointing and time consuming for all parties.
There are two solutions for this. The option that no one likes is for our designers to totally recreate the submitted artwork in a file type that we can use. The downside to this is that we must charge $75 per hour, and impose a $75 minimum fee for this service. Firm quote will be given when you send artwork.
The best option is for us to receive your ideas in a file format that we can use or convert. The following is a list of acceptable formats.
They are: Adobe Illustrator (ai), EPS, or vectorized PDF. (Vectorized PDF means that the file was created in Illustrator and then saved as a PDF.) Some CAD/CAM formats (DWG or DXF) are usually ok.
However, even these acceptable file formats are not without some conditions.
All text must be converted to outlines. Artwork should be vectorized. Rasterized images (common to photo editing software) are not acceptable. Caution should be used to assure that lines are joined (welded), and that there are not multiple overlaid lines. Embedded or linked files are equally unacceptable.
List of definitely unacceptable formats:
GIF, JPG, TIFF, BMP, PCX, Microsoft Powerpoint (PPT), Microsoft Word (DOC), Adobe Photoshop (PSD), Quark (QXD) Pagemaker, or any other text or word processor program.
A further condition is we cannot “blow up” an image (make it larger) without sacrificing clarity. We can always remove pixels to make the image smaller, but cannot add pixels and maintain resolution. Neither can you, so don’t do that and send us the file, it won’t work.
