Files Done Right

Actually, before we get started, I just need to double check that something bad didn't happen. Hold on.

I love how casually he says that. I just have to check that something bad hasn't happened.

Welcome to the marketing team in one podcast, where we have conversations about the issues one person marketing teams face when trying to meet their goals with limited time and budgets. Now, here's your host. Eric and Mike.

You look really disturbed. What's, what's, what's, why are you so sad? Thanks for asking and noticing.

I appreciate that. Well, you came in physically weeping, so I just, I care what's going on. Thank you, Mike. I, I just, I'm reminded again of the pain and suffering that so many have gone through in this career. Um, of sending a file. You know, usually at a deadline, there's usually some sort of hair being pulled, tears being shed.

And the final thing is send that email, send the file. And you're like, Oh, I did it. This is it. I'm done. You know, yep, off, grab a nice hot tea, maybe do some meditative, you know, soul searching. And then you're repaired from the trauma that was maybe that project. Lo and behold, seven o'clock at night you get another email.

That file wasn't the right one. I need a different file.

Back to it. Back on the train. Yep. So, So people, people are confused, you're picking up on some confusion about files in general? Like, Yeah. There's a lot of different ways we can save things. Yeah, we all know that yep, but they don't all work for the right situation. Yes,So I I think I'm just doing a little PSA Podcast here this episode will be about files Okay and I just want to help people kind of maybe do a little bit help people understand a little bit more of the different types of files and how those can be helpful or Maybe hurtful hurtful files.

Well a file you have to resend or doesn't work Causes just a little bit of extra pain in that project and it doesn't have to be for people the person who's dealing with it And the person who sent it to him, you know, so it's like file ping pong file ping pong Hmm. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, we're trying to reduce that.

Yeah, let's just do it one time. Everybody's got what they need. Boom. It's gonna get printed or Reproduced in a certain way. It's perfect. Do you see that picking up a lot more lately now that digital? Mediums are so prevalent. Do you think that, do you see that, that stuff that might be okay for a screen and then tried to be repurposed is, is not working in the, is that a big culprit of it?

Yeah. And I think it's a, people need to have a little bit more of a deeper fundamental understanding of what some of these platforms can provide as far as art is concerned. And I think there's wonderful advances around Canva and some of those platforms, Figma. Those are great. You know, opportunities for people to, a lot of different types of people who don't have the ability to maybe pay for Adobe or, you know, just don't want to learn it because it's complicated.

Um, they can go into those platforms and produce art and it passes inspection, everybody loves it internally, it's great, now we have to send it somewhere and it might not be what is going to work for that vendor. What do you mean work? Like what, what makes a, what makes a file not work for that vendor?

Let's say. So there's a variety of different factors that come to play on that. And one is of course the file format. What is, what kind of format did it deliver in? Was it a JPEG? Was it a TIFF? Was it a illustrator file? An InDesign file? PDF. Those are pretty common. CorelDRAW. CorelDRAW file. Wow. Oof. That one.

That's a blast from the past. That might still exist, actually. It does wow. Yeah, that's one of those programs does quark still exist. Oh, that's a good question. I don't know I'd love to see what that if it does i'd love to see what that looks like now I I cut my teeth on quark and was quite the pro But yeah, so there's the file format.

Yep. The next is the color space. How is it being reproduced? Is it digitally then everything anything in rgb color space is great But you have to understand if something is going to be printed, not digitally printed by the way. But, if something is going to be printed on a printing press or a silkscreen press, There's ink involved and there's no rgb ink.

There's only cmyk ink or Spot color. Yeah. So spot colors are like, are what ends up happening when like, there's a lot of screen colors, those RGB colors that are like big, bold and vibrant and everything. Right. And then, um, people, you can't recreate that if you're going with the typical, like CMYK colors, right.

There's a, because the, the screen is illuminated from behind. Right. So like, that's what allows some of that, but you can, there's, there's That's if you wanted to recreate some of those colors, that's where some spot colors could come into play. Right? Like those, like I'm thinking like a [00:06:00] fluorescent ink of some sort, right?

You could use a fluorescent ink to try and make that work, but you can't just expect that your neon green Thing in your Canva file that you sent to be digitally printed is gonna come up neon green in the printout. Yeah, so that color space thing is, it's a really, boy.We could spend hours talking about color space and the science behind it and reflective as opposed to transmissive color RGB is transmitted into your eyes CMYK you need to have a light source reflect off of it to see it.

You know, there's You know whole programs in college around this it's a - it's a complicated world. But the basics are one is either you're projecting it on a screen and the other is you're printing it on something So there's ink involved when you print something. That's - that's the difference is really let's think about let's simplify it down to that Like rgb colors can be very bright and very colorful when you transmit that to printing it - It may not translate as effectively or be as bright and, you know, energetic.

So when you're talking about like You we're talking about this file ping pong that happens, right? Like are you suggesting that You should know your destination when you're starting Absolutely. Yeah, let's let's look at the final destination and work with I would say if print is involved in that equation in some way Let's say you're doing a social media campaign But there's also a printed postcard that goes with that work on the postcard get the photos looking great and everything working for that printed piece first, then translate that to digital.

And that's going to be a better way because not only do you need to work with a different color space. The different format for whatever, however you're printing it, but you also need to think about it in terms of resolution. That's the third piece of that equation that you really got to pay attention to.

Um, and the resolution is something that when you're printing, you need to have very high resolution because printing presses need- your eyes are looking at something that's being printed and it needs to have very fine detail. And that fine detail in a photograph means a lot more pixels, which means you need to provide a very, usually a pretty large file for whatever that photo is.

So the size of the file is very indicative of how high quality that file is. So that's why I say, start with stuff that's going to go to print and then work your way into the digital space first. So you've got to work with pretty high resolution images even at small sizes, it's pretty surprising how big some of those files can be.

So, yeah, I mean, it's a pretty, pretty big red flag. If you've get an email sent to you with an attachment and you see that it's like 6k, right? That's supposed to be a photo. You're going to be using your troubles. Right across the board. Yeah, it's pretty, I think in terms of like when you're printing something the resolution needs to have about 300 dots per inch at whatever size it's being printed.

So 300 pixels per inch, you know, that's a lot more when you're now when you're on a screen, that's 72 pixels per inch. So it's very forgiving, I guess you could say. But then you get into like, We're finding more and more, especially like with, I mean, the, the displays that people have nowadays, especially their phone, they're, they're so dense that you, they're a little bit less forgiving than they used to be too.

Like, and so, um, Size, the size of the files matters. The data in the files matters, and you don't want to be stripping that out when you're sending it, especially when you're trying to print something. I think size is a, the size of the files is a really good indicator, because there's a lot of different things at play.

It shows how high a quality the image, imagery is in that file. Um, you also though need to be wary that, When you're sending files via email, if you're going back and forth with a client or something like that,  those files really should be kept under five megabytes. I know that most emails now can, I just got one the other day that was like 75 MBs, you know, it was no big deal, but let's just assume for just, you know, we can be pretty rest assured the industry standard is five megabytes, that size file should be able to go through an email.

Okay. Pretty consistently on any file. So what if I've got a, you're telling me I have to have a high resolution file, and you're telling me that I have to squeeze it into a 5 meg box. Um, who are you sending it to? If you're going back and forth with a client, I would say you need to save it out as a lower res, lower size file, and you can make it either the smallest PDF size if you're making a PDF, or you just reduce the resolution if you're sending an image.

And then just get them to approve it and move it through the system. But if you're sending it to print, That one might be you have to put it up on an FTP site or put it on a Google Drive and give them a link so they can download it because some of the files that we work with I know are in the multiple gigabytes, you know, I mean if you're talking What's FTP?

I think that was all the rage a while before that a lot of the content was Cloud file services are, but they're, they're not easy to use for anybody. And like, they're not, it's kind of a weird, obscure thing. Now you can just upload it, upload your file to a browser and have it available and share that folder.

It's way easier. Yeah. A lot of the, the printers and the people that make, you know, the things that need to be printed, they have, you know, some sort of file repository system built into their sites usually that makes it easier, but, um, Yeah, you know when you're talking about things like big event graphics and like a photograph That's got to be 12 foot by 10 foot or something like that.

That's a gigantic file I mean, it's hundreds and hundreds of MBs just for the picture, you know So I it's hard because it's something that you kind of got to check before you send those emails But for one make sure that the emails that you're sending are not You know, two gigabytes or something kr4zey like that.

Yeah. Um, sometimes it's easy to just, you get into the motion and you're like, Ah, click, drag, but put it over there and then all of a sudden nobody got the email and, you know, those kind of things. So it's a very difficult, uh, challenge to work around. But like I said, you can also take screenshots of things if you need to get it to the client and have them approve something and.

Sign off on it. That might be just the easiest way to do it. I mean, there's a lot of great proofing tools out there online too, right? Like, so you're not swapping files back and forth where you can have things, you know, Adobe, Adobe has the acrobat online, right? So where you can have everybody collaborating on like, so you don't have everybody taking their own file.

And providing feedback on it and everything. So there are other options there too, right? Like to, that's a pretty common one that works really well. Is that Adobe, they allow you to take an Acrobat file and put it on there and have multiple people mark it up and you could see all the progress on them.

That's really probably the only way to do larger projects, especially if it's that single. single source of truth, right? Like, yeah, but that's, that's a diversion a little bit. I think we're really, we're just trying to make sure that if you are, when you're using files, like you want to make sure that you know what, what I'm hearing from you is that you want to know what the, what's its role right now, right?

Like, so, um, If you're sending something over email, you want to be a good email citizen too, right? You don't want to send something that's unnecessarily large if it doesn't warrant that, right? So like that's where like creating some kind of pdf that somebody's going to be looking at or needs to Knowing that it's not a final thing, but you need it's a it's just to tell facilitating quicker movements back and forth, right?

Because it's not a huge file and it's, it'll do, but you don't want to use that same file when you're sending it to the printer, because it might not have all the details that'll have a better product at the end. Right. Yeah. I think that it's important to understand the, the, the different types of files that need to go to print are probably, you know, when you're working with a client and you're working in the development and the approval process, that's probably just going to be PDFs or JPEGs. Yeah. But ideally, it's probably a PDF because they can mark it up and make comments on that. That seems to work the most easiest for everybody or some sort of online platform for that.

And if something is going to go to print, though, you need to understand that then that's a whole different world and there's print production involved in that. To take care of all those little extra details that you may not see at a digital product for whatever you're producing. Uh, digital products are very forgiving, right?

You, you said, there's issues around resolution, I guess, right now. But, um, most of the digital stuff that you put on, you know, Instagram or something, if it's a social campaign or even a Google ad or Facebook ad. They're very tiny and very lightweight files, you know, very easy to work with and very almost out of necessity You don't like because of people's bandwidth concerns and stuff like that You want to make sure that you have the files be as optimized as possible, especially web Web graphics and stuff like that, but print again is a whole different world and print can mean a lot of different things I mean, I had a class in college that we always used to kind of chuckle at the name of it was called reproduction techniques Yeah, get me and some friends around a table with some beers and talk about that class talk about reproduction techniques.

Yep Yeah, we didn't call it that but that was that's, that was a good way to describe the college experience. Believe me everybody signed up for that class. I bet I mean, yeah, we what yeah You I don't see any. Models here. I don't see any like how my models not, not models, but dummies. I don't see any kind of like No schematics people were pretty disappointed about three weeks in there.

Like I'm on air That is a class where we learned a lot about there's not just there's embroidery. There's varnish There's printing with four color. There's printing with spot color when you're working on projects that have large Um, format, so event graphics, things like that. You've got packaging.

Packaging requires all kinds of different specialized techniques, and when you're, you know, reproducing those packages over and over, they could, they need die cutting, they need printing, they need varnishing, they need embossing sometimes, all kinds of kr4zey other techniques. So that's another file, uh, you need to be wary when you're working in those kind of projects that, Uh, stuff that goes to the printer or stuff that's like final, final that goes to print needs to be, um, that's a, a much more different file than a PDF file or, um, a JPEG or something like that.

Like you would never send a PNG to print. You would never really send a jpeg to print Um, those are just off limits. You're going to use file formats that are more like eps files Ai files in design files You can use a pdf file if it's just a very simple project you can print off of a pdf file There is an actual setting that says press ready pdf that you can use when you're Making the PDF and that's specifically if you're using in the design for your layout, right?

Yes Okay, I think you can do it in Illustrator too. Okay, but I don't see that this is you know We're deep into the Adobe suite Yeah software at this point because it's a little bit more specialized work and There's a lot more to do on that side of it as opposed to working in a Canva or Figma or something like that Where you really don't have a lot of those options And you can print stuff out of Canva.

I'm not saying I never print I want to get to that in a little bit because I think there's like, but like walking through the steps, I mean, I think there's a lot of, you could wait till the end. And check that all you would have like a pre flight of like checking that all these things are right. But like pros won't do that.

I'm in this space as a marketer where like, I'm kind of, I'm not, I'm not designing all the time. I can fake the funk, right? Nice. So like if I, I'm using Canva here, And I'm trying to, I'm, I'm hounding the person who's in charge of like recruitment or something. And we want to do some recruitment fair or something.

I need them to send pictures of the last recruitment fair. I want to put that together in some kind of printed sheet that we can distribute at a local college or something like that. Right. Let's say you're that person who's, who's, they're using Canva. They're trying to collect a bunch of photos from people who have no idea what.

Any of this is right? Like are there some things you look at right up front like, like when they send it like are there some Red flags you look at for the files that you get. It's, it is surprising still to this day how many emails I get that are You know, and iPhones do great. I mean Samsung, iPhone, your, the phone in your pocket can provide pretty much the quality you need for most things you're gonna print, especially this kind of a scenario.

You can print that photo up full size. Mm hmm and still not worry about resolution or sharpness or things like that. Those are the things that degrade But I think as a default a lot of people when they're emailing stuff or sending it they always send the smallest size And that will never work. I mean, you don't have the resolution.

So I'm always first looking at resolution. Okay. I can change color schemes and color spaces as per needed. And the sensitivities on the print side of things are not as great as they used to be. The fidelity still isn't there to translate an RGB photo to CMYK perfectly, but it's not as painful as something that if you don't have the resolution.

So if it's the wrong resolution, then we're out to lunch. So basically like. This person that sent you the emails, they're probably on their phone. They took the pictures or something. And then I know on the iPhone, right. There's like you, when you try and send a photo, it's like, do you want to do small, medium, large, or original?

Right. So you're saying like, ideally you get that original size, original original. Yeah. It's just, you, you're dumbing it down. If you don't, yeah. Maybe large, but yeah, try it, you know, and that is fine. Are there things you can do if, um, you know, If it's close, like it's not quite big enough, like, yeah, I think most of these platforms now offer some sort of AI solution that raises it up with varying degrees of success, depending, you know, especially if you're cropping in on a photo and you just want that one person who's down in the corner in a dark spot and there's not a lot of light and that's another reason why you want that biggest file possible, because like you might not want to use the whole thing, like, you know, you might have a whole, like, let's say it's a whole, you know, conference floor of people walking around and those maybe that person's flipping off the camera.

You definitely don't want them in there, right? You want to make sure that you've got the people, there's always one, but you might want to zoom in on the people that are, um, look like they're enjoying themselves. Right. And so, but that, if you're scaling that up, that's where that resolution comes into play too, right?

You got to make sure that you have the highest quality thing. So you, and you might've got a photo that seemed good if you were using it as it is, but if you've zoomed in and cropped and everything, you might not have enough of that resolution too, right? Yeah. And ideally you have access to that original file.

You took the original photo. The thing that also you speaking about resolution that we run into consistently is that people are taking screenshots and then enlarging them or they're shooting it. Shots, they're trying to pull stuff off of maybe just a, some corner of a website or something like that and saying, well, for one, stealing it, you know, which you can't do, you have to get the rights to use photos and stuff like that.

Um, but then you want to make sure that you're not capturing the screenshot version of those things. Yeah, and that's a really hard thing even when you're doing a search online and find stuff that may or may not work you really should be trying to source that photo some other place and Ideally if it's for commercial use you have to pay rights for that, you know And so that's where like royalty or stock photos come in But they're gonna provide you with all the highest quality stuff there So if I so I've got a let's say I've got to send you a bunch of photos Photos, right?

And there, there might be some context that's needed and everything like that. Could I, like, add them to a Word doc and then send you the Word doc? Yeah, that's happened to, hasn't it? Yeah. Um, how do you get over that? So I've had varying degrees of success with that. Um, most of the time it's not really great.

Yeah. Uh, because word does its own processing and no word is not a design program and cannot provide really anything on the level of any sort of other design layout program. Yeah, it's a word processing Yep, so it just throws everything in the one column basically or two. Of course if you set up to, I think a lot of people that's, they're like, that's their killer app They know how to use it.

That's what's on their computer. Like it's the best way to yeah. Yeah, it's the same thing, right? like and I think I think a lot of people use that as like a delivery mechanism, especially if they've got some other things going on. They want to add a photo and then maybe there's a caption that should go with that or instructions about how to use it.

And I could see where they're coming from. Like, especially if you've got something that's multiple pages or something like that, like, Hey, this should go here. Let's use this for this. And, but if they just deliver you that word file when I'm, I'm leading ahead a little bit, but I'm, you're basically saying they've failed.

They failed in their job. Miserably. Miserably. Yes. So how did, so while that word doc is valuable. Yes. Because it's providing you context and additional information that maybe the image alone can't convey. Do - would you suggest like sending, sending the photos? Separately as well. Well, yeah. And I think that that's where it gets challenging because there's naming, you know, let's say it's 150 photos, you know, like we work on some gigantic publications that have a lot of photos and sometimes we'll get a photo dump from a client that is great, super helpful, but they might try to catalog it that way.

And then we've lost what the name of the file is. And so that becomes a big burden as well. And so it's much better to try to create like a contact sheet. That's something that I know that, um, might be a little bit challenging. So you're talking about like having, let's say we've got a hundred photos to kind of sort through and all of those could be used.

There's, they're all decent photos. They're all high enough resolution. Right. But like providing guidance about naming, uh, you, you were mentioning something. Well, it's, it's hard to look at a hundred photos. Just like right out of the box. It takes forever, you don't want to download them all. Maybe you do, but you want to ideally look at them quickly somehow.

So, the delivery access to those photos is going to be on some sort of an online folder. Maybe a Google Drive folder. Some other product out there. So, you're going to see it, and that might help. But a lot of times they crop the image and you can't see the full image. And it might not be specific to it. So, we use something called a contact sheet, which it comes from photography a million years ago, where you would just lay down a bunch of negatives on a sheet, expose it to light.

And then you'd have one page that would have all of your photos on there. You'll see it in one context. And you can still do that through Adobe Bridge is one of those tools. You can do that if you're familiar with using it. I'm not sure what other tools are out there, and that might be something that we might want to investigate, but.

Yeah. Um, it's hard to kind of just capture all the photos, organize them on one page and then be able to look at them very quickly and review them and make sure that maybe you're not going to use all of them. Yep. So having some sort of a guide like that would be helpful. Maybe that's what that word document would could be is just a look, see all of the photos that are here, but you're not going to like go grab that photo out of the word doc and use that in some sort of printed project.

Oh gosh, that happens a lot. Yeah, and that's You know, I understand that there's a convenience factor that makes sense, but you really can't. You need to that original quality highest quality photo that you can get and as I said. You know iphones and everything in our pocket is, is at that resolution. You don't have to worry about it as long as it's not dumbed down and reduced in quality fidelity. So we've been talking a lot about photos, right?

Like but what about things like your business logo and stuff? Um Have you seen things go sideways with logos? Absolutely. All the time. Every day. It's terrible. Um, no, I think the problem with photo, with logo files, uh, and this gets into, you know, again, where are we putting it? If it's gonna be online, does it need to be transparent?

Is it a JPEG? Then it's not transparent. If it needs to be transparent, then it's a PNG file. There's no other file option that you can use for that. I don't think, uh, most platforms you can't upload a PDF and post that as a, you know, image file on a website or something like that. Um, so those PNG files and JPEG files are really helpful for that, uh, kind of a purpose.

Let's say you're though printing or you're embossing or you're, um, embroidering a shirt. What's interesting about embroidery is that you don't need any of that stuff because an embroidery process has to go through a different process. All they need is a picture, and it really can be a low resolution picture, so you can use that low res photo to have them map them the embroidery process to interest their machinery.

So you can get away with anything when you're doing any sort of embroidery, but printing, yeah. I assumed you had to, it'd be better to have some kind of like vector type thing, something that's, you know, um, scales to any size, when you, when you've got limited colors and everything. So they don't even use those, that information?

Yeah, when you're doing embroidery, it's like they give you the 92 different colors of thread they have. And there's red and orange and silver and gray and black and you know, uh, but this doesn't map to any sort of other color standards. So like when we're typically working on branding, we use spot colors or PMS colors or Pantone colors.

And that is a consistent library. That's a universal standard set by Pantone that establishes what, uh, what that color actually is so that red is is this ink combination mix, you know Reflex blue is going to be reflex blue here on this this printing this thread this right when they set up the closest thing there is to Uh, consistent color library.

Yeah, color standards universally, I guess. There's a multitude of different color standards, but the ones that are typically used in printing things is Pantone. And that's where it gets also confusing, and we can kind of go down the two different channels of printing. Um, you've got spot color, and you've got process color.

Yep. Most things that people see in a magazine are printed full color. Full color printing is process where you're using four different inks. You're using cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. That's it, usually. We usually tell, right? Because when you, if you get up really close, you can see all the little dots that are kind of offset.

That matrix? The matrix, to see that, you know, or take a magnifying glass to it or something like that. You can see that, oh, that, that blue and yellow are coming together to make that green color. So we've talked about four color process. That's all CMYK. That's how most things you see are printed. Even most digital printing, right?

Like when something's digitally printed, it's that four color process. You'll still be able to see the dot printed by that digital printer, yeah. And then there's like printing press printing, and that would include things that would also be four color process. But there's also specific colors that are defined by Pantone that you'll see used maybe in more packaging scenarios, or higher level printing where maybe a brand color is really important. 

Maybe it's coca cola red or it's something like that where they don't really want to use four colors to mix together to make that one color. They actually just mix inks and and build that solid one color ink as that color so that it's pure and you get a lot better fidelity out of that single branded color or multiple sometimes we've even- if you think of like silk screening a lot of times silk screen when they lay down that ink they'll lay down multiple different colors. That gets pretty complicated when you're talking about Reproducing stuff on silk screen.

Again, you're working with spot colors and sometimes process colors as well CMYK but a lot of times that's Maybe nine or 10 colors that we'll print a t shirt for. So if you see some kr4zey, like Harley Davidson t shirt, sometimes those, those shirts are printing three, uh, four spot colors as well as a four color process.

So there might be eight colors on the press running. Yeah. Yeah. So it can get complicated as we get into that print side of it. But like the spot, the best way to probably put it, or there's maybe not the best, but a way to, The spot colors is a lot closer to going to the home improvement store and having them mix a paint.

Perfect. And that paint is what you put on the wall, right? It's the, it's the same thing. Yep. Whereas like the process ones, it's, it's a little bit more like finer detail. Um, almost like pointalism and, Mm-Hmm. It'd be like what, what you'd send to your color printer at home. Yeah. Or a, you know, inkjet printer or something like that.

Yeah. That's a pro- probably a good scenario people have to buy, you know? Magenta, yellow, cyan, black when they use their inkjet printers at home, kind of those things. They got one of those really fancy photo ones that have like the, all the, yeah, yeah. Those are ridiculous. Look great though. They do. They look amazing.

Um, yeah, so getting back to that ink side of things, just be wary of how you're reproducing things. And kind of like you said before, go into it with that understanding before you start the project. Now when you're talking about logo files, I think we talked about there's the digital side, the print side.

Um, I'll just make a, uh, generalization here about what you could for each of those. So we've got digital side. That's gonna be JPEGs PNGs sometimes...

I'm opinionated on the web side of things that like you should never use a JPEG version of your logo. Yes, maybe an SVG? SVGs PNGs and stuff like that. JPEGs are meant for photos Like okay saving something out that's got limited colors as a JPEG.

You're gonna get a lot of fuzzy uh fuzzy areas and everything like that. So like my, if you're dealing with minimal colors, the best thing in my mind is to use the vector kind of formats, right? Because there's scale to a bunch of different things that are a lot more flexible, um, that on the web, there are a lot smaller sizes, you know, it doesn't like you could.

I don't know why you'd want to do that, but you could, and it's the same file size as if you were going to have it super small. So you have a lot of flexibility with the vector, um, layout. So that would be a SVG file. SVG for the web. Okay. Yeah. And, um, And then PNGs, PNGs are great. If you want, um, if you need that transparency in there and, um, you have those limited colors, you can really optimize it because really on the web, we're talking a lot about trying to have the highest fidelity with the lowest file size and that that's super important.

And so, um, whereas that isn't a concern on the print side of things, we want the best resolution and we don't care if the file sizes get really big. Cause. It really doesn't matter. But on the web, every little K that you can shave off of something matters for the end user. So we always want to be really selective on what we're doing with those file sizes, which is the exact opposite of printing.

Yep, exactly. Printing. You want to include as many of those K's as possible. Yep. That's kilobytes. That's file size. That means if you've got a photo, that's five MBs and you've got a photo, that's 15 MBs, use the one that's 15 MBs for print. For print, I should say. Yeah. Um, so that's where it does get very different.

So when you're delivering print projects, it's AI files, which are illustrator files, it's in design files, it's, um, PDFs, high resolution, the highest quality PDF files that you can use, those can work as well. Um,  EPS files are pretty consistent. TIFF files. If it's just a photograph, sometimes a TIFF will have more, um, data inside of it as an image file, then.

JPEG for sure. There's a lot of compression that happens in imagery. That's what I was gonna get at. All those file formats you're talking about don't really inherently have any kind of compression applied to them, right? Yep. Whereas the, the web formats, PNGs, JPEGs, um, WebP is a newer standard out there.

Um, those. inherently do have a lot of compression. And you can, almost every tool you use there, there's a quality thing and what you're choosing. And it's, they may describe it as quality, you know, like low quality, high quality, but there's also a thing that says lowest file size, highest file size, right?

So you're, they're making it very clear that that's, uh, the, the, range you're trying to deal with and everything. So, um, compression is a huge part of it. Yeah. Compression. You want no compression on anything  that's going to a printer for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Cause compression in a lot of cases will show artifacts of that compression, especially JPEGs.

Yeah. Yeah. So our hope here is that we, we can kind of provide everybody with a good solid under foundational understanding of a little bit about print a little bit about digital and correct files that you might want to use for those because it can be pretty frustrating if if you feel like you're finished with a project and you deliver a certain file to a Vendor or a printer and it's not then you got to go back and redo it and sometimes when we're working on some of these projects taking a file that was a Image on the web, turning it into something that we can print at high quality at the right size, that sometimes takes an extra level of process.

But then the next one would be, let's say you want to take that and you want to make a silkscreen version of that five color logo or image that then as a whole other complicated process, that's even more challenging and takes a lot more time. So there can be, that's why you really want to start off with whatever is that highest effort file size for your final product.

Start there and then work your way down. You can always diminish or decrease the quality or the fidelity of whatever that file is, and then deliver that later. But always try to start with that more complicated version. And hopefully you can deliver the right file at the right time to the right vendor and get it looking right, right out of the box.

So can you, should we start working on trying to assemble an angry mob of torch bearers and pitchforks and everything against sending small photos in a Word doc and to end Calling it done? Anytime we can gather a group a mob. Yes. I'm all for it. Yeah Yeah, especially around that concept. So let's say you let's say I don't know what I'm doing, which is often the case, but I don't know what I'm doing.

I send you this PNG and I'm like, hey, um, it's our logo from the website. I just dragged it off the website and I sent it to you. I'm like, hey, can you get this put on some t shirts? And immediately strike back and say no. Yeah. No way in heck. No way in hell. But like, Hey, this is all I got. I mean, what do you do in that case like that?

That's a I know, I know. I do know. Mm-Hmm. That's a tough challenge right there. Okay. There's a couple of hacks that I've used in the past. Okay. First hack is of course, reach out to their brand cop or their brand person who might be, you know, somewhere else or in a different office or something that has some sort of a brand standard or some sort of a.

Yeah. Master guide, when they had their logo developed or designed, they got it from that designer and they've got an original file. That's the first step almost every time, right? You get a, you get a crappy file that you know came from Yes. a better parent. Yes. So to speak. Yes. Try and find that parent. Try to find the parents.

Exactly. It's like a lost child. I have used Hacks before though where I've been out of time and especially for logo files. Something that I'll do is I'll go back into their website and they may have some downloadable files and resources. Maybe as an ebook or maybe as a brochure or something that you can download.

Download that PDF. You can open up that PDF in other higher end graphics programs, pull it out there and pull it out from there. So like a vector logo is a perfect example. You could open up the annual report maybe, and on the cover is the logo usually. So you can just open that up in illustrator, grab that vector file, save it out as a logo.

Now that's. Maybe higher level hack job on that. I've got an even higher one that I've used before like if if The web developers did a good job and trying to send the best thing sometimes that their logo like in that top left corner of their website or something like that is in an SVG format if you can Download that SVG file at least its vector And you can scale it up.

And then you're going to have to be in Illustrator probably working. Yeah, or I mean, I think you could probably do it in Canva too. Like take that, Canva will take those SVG files and you can probably mess with it that way. Yeah. But, um, yeah, but I mean, I've had instances where somebody sends us something.

It's maybe, it's a partner's logo and the partner's too busy to care. We've both spent time redrawing logos, haven't we? That's another option. You can hire somebody to do it, and I know that there's probably online platforms that you can send stuff to and get stuff digitized or drawn in Illustrator. I know Illustrator will do that.

And I say Illustrator because that's the main program that creates vector files. Yeah. Yeah. Vector is scalable infinitely. you don't have to worry about anything about resolution, but the image level that you get is you can't really get like photographic quality out of it. It's more for graphics and hard edged shapes and things like that.

Yeah. So yeah, that is a difficult thing to get low quality and not really be able to find The parent or the highest quality fidelity, whatever you're looking for on that. And that's, there's, it can be maddening, really maddening. It can stop projects dead in their tracks. Really? Yeah. I mean, it, it depends too.

I mean, worst case scenario, photos might be a little bit more forgiving because they can be scaled up and they might be a little bit blurry and not sharp. I argue that reflects on the quality of your brand a little bit because you're not using optimal, you know, you're, it just kind of shows you don't really care that much.

Mm hmm, but that said if you're making a billboard, you know, it's a it's shocking when you think the scale of a billboard But the fact that you're so far away from a billboard, you don't really need a lot of resolution I think most billboards that that I've done are 1400 pixels wide which when you think about it, you're like wait, it's 40 feet long, you know, but It's so far away that it's irrelevant.

Yeah, same with large amount graphics and things like that. Yeah But yeah, worst case scenario, you just have to run with what you got and then you know If nobody cares enough to give you the right stuff, then it's gonna reflect and that's unfortunate You can try to do as many hacks as possible to try to make it work But yeah, you know, you kind of back up against the wall I would say. Any other tips for preventing the, the file ping pong?

Really try to understand what the end result is. Think of the end first, what's the end game and produce towards that as much as possible for your final finished piece. If you can, you're always working in the highest fidelity file for your final process, but to get those. Comments, feedbacks, round of revisions, use PDFs, use low resolution, use small file size stuff that doesn't eat up email.

You know, try to stick to the five megabyte email rule. You can only control what you can control, right? So that's checking things, trying to be along the way, if like, the, the inputs that you get, making sure that you can check those things for quality early on and get it back. You can't control it. Maybe you can provide a little bit of guidance to people who are sending you things to help prevent some of that ping pong.

But if you can work on your side to make sure that things are correct, you can make sure that you're not. Causing somebody else to volley it back to you. If you have to print something and it's it's Start with the printer start with the final a lot of times if it's event graphics or banners or pull ups or stuff like that There's usually a spec sheet that the producer will send to you and you can always send that ask for that right up front So you're working in that size immediately and you never have to scale it up scaling things up Reduces quality all the every time.

Yep. Well, I'm clear. Oh good. Yeah. How about you? You'll never send me the wrong file again. I can't make that promise. Oh, I'll try. All right. I'll try to do the same, Mike. Awesome. Thanks, man. Yeah. See ya.

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