Midland Graphics

Knowing What To Send Us Can Save You Money!

All to often, customers who provide artwork for screenprinting and embroidery are unaware as to what to send us. This will, hopefully, provide you with information that will help streamline your order. We work with the Adobe Creative Cloud software and use Mac computers and have no trouble working with files created on either PC or Mac platforms.

What to Look Out For!
Designs usually originate from three sources...Hard Copy Art, Computer Generated Art, or Custom Designed In-House Art (we design). Below are suggestions as to what you can do, along with questions you can ask the client (or yourself), before sending us your design.

An Art Charge will be applied to designs that take more than 30 minutes to process.

HARD COPY ART

(artwork that needs to be reproduced from printed paper, t-shirts, etc...)
If you bring us a drawing or printout DO NOT COLOR OR SHADE IN THE DRAWING (if possible). Otherwise, we may have to spend hours removing colors and shading in the design.

Questions you need to ask:

• Is your artwork Camera Ready? An older term used prior to the creation of computers, true camera-ready art is a clear black and white image on white paper at a size that can be enlarged to T-shirt dimensions while maintaining image integrity. Lines are thick. There are no grays. Paper is not wrinkled, ripped, or taped together and no smudges, spots, or pencil or pen marks cover the image in any way. Look at your image and determine if it is indeed "camera ready." If not, either locate a better image or expect an art charge for cleanup or new artwork creation time.

• Is this the only art you can provide? The largest and cleanest version of any design you provide goes a long way. Why give us a logo on a napkin when there’s a better rendition on letterhead. The better the quality, the less time and money is spent on reproducing the art.

• Has your art been reproduced anywhere else? Some customers will bring in artwork, thats been previously printed before, and expect us to reproduce the same design. It may be cost effective to contact the service that originally produced the artwork and have it sent to us.

• What size do you want your design printed? We can resize any design to your liking. Unless otherwise specified, we will determine the best size for your design.

• When necessary, may we substitute Type Fonts? We have a wide variety of type fonts in our computer library. Occasionally we stumble across a design that uses a font we don’t have. When this occurs, we can either substitute that font for one that comes close in style or auto trace the original. Auto tracing is more precise, but takes time to execute and will add to the cost of reproduction.

SCANNING AN IMAGE
When scanning an image we suggest it be scanned at 100% of actual size and between 200 and 300 DPI resolution. Images should be then saved as either a jpeg, .tif, eps, or pdf image. Files scanned at a lower resolution will not provide us with adequate resources to produce the job at it’s best quality. Images that are larger than the bed size of your scanner should be forwarded to us for scanning.

All artwork sent to us in a Hard copy form may require an art charge.

COMPUTER GENERATED ART

(artwork sent to us via email, zip disks, floppys, CDs, etc...)
We welcome artwork sent to us electronically. Email is probably the most common method for sending your artwork. We do accept artwork delivered on flash sticks, CD’s, and via e-mail. Before Sending Us Your Files, There are a Few Things to Consider:

▪ What software was the art created in? The best scenario is for your art to have been created with a software we have. Opening and manipulating the design is less restrictive this way. We’d presently are working with Adobe software (i.e Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign). We can extract graphics and text from other software.

▪ Is this the original file it was created in? We work best with the original file that the design it was created in. When a design is converted to a jpeg (or similar file format) prepress work cannot be performed and an art charge will be applied to reproduce the design.

▪ Did you include all fonts and pictures? When sending us your files we require that elements (i.e. pictures, graphics, fonts) used to create the design be included. Any font used in the graphic should be either converted to paths or curves or should be included.

What you can do:

▪ Convert all your text to outlines (or paths)
▪ Eliminate traps and masks (or indicate to us they are used in design.)
▪ If possible convert all colors to Spot colors.
▪ Include all images (such as tiff, eps, pict, etc...) with files sent.
▪ Provide us a paper print of what the finished design will look like so we can verify the file sent to us is entact.

• When necessary, may we substitute Type Fonts? We have a wide variety of type fonts in our computer library. Occasionally we stumble across a design that uses a font we don’t have. When this occurs, we can either substitute that font for one that comes close in style or auto trace the original. Auto tracing is more precise, but takes time to execute and will add to the cost of reproduction.

ARTWORK NEEDING LITTLE OR NO WORK
Designs created in a vector software such as Adobe Illustrator .AI, .EPS, .ART, .PDF files, Freehand Files, InDesign Files, Corel Draw Files saves as PDFs
Vectored Images and Fonts converted to "Outline or Paths". Otherwise sent us a copy of the font(s) with the original file.

ARTWORK NEEDING WORK (reproducing)
Files saved as JPEG, GIF, TIFF, PICTS, QuickTime, BMP, Files downloaded from the web, Low Resolution scans,
Files saved in Corel Draw, Photoshop, Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, Quark Express.

FILES WE CANNOT OPEN
Publisher, Canvas, Photo Paint. These files would need to be be either scanned or a hard copy sent to us for processing.

CUSTOM "IN-HOUSE" DESIGNS

Our art department can interpret your ideas into any design of your liking. We can create simple one color graphics to multi-color process designs that can be displayed on darks as well as light color wearables. With our over 35 years of experience we are confident we can handle the message you want to project.

For art charges that may or may not apply visit our "Design" page.