How to get your art work ready for printing.

What kind of artwork you need depends entirely upon what you are printing.  Different print processes require different forms of art work. Keep in mind when creating your logo, how will you be using it?  Will it be small for your business cards, and will you need it at poster size for a display?  If so, you should use a vector based program to create it in, such as Illustrator or Corel Draw. Why?  Well vectors are resolution independent, meaning that they can be scaled up or down without any loss of image or detail of any kind and contain no pixels. Most people make the mistake of creating their artwork in PhotoShop. PhotoShop is a raster based graphics program.  Raster graphics are generally only used in printing for images in you page layout file.  Creating your logo or any kind of type written wording in Photoshop will not give you the desired effect.  Why you may ask?  Well, for one thing, raster images are made up of hundreds of bits of information (called pixels) which will render any type as tiny dots thereby giving you type a fuzzy look there are 305 pixels to an inch). Programs like Illustrator create your artwork as a vector file - solid with no dots.  Another limitation on Photoshop images is, providing that you have set you file up as high resolution 300dpi (dots per inch) that they can only be upsized by 100% any larger than this and they loose detail.  You should always call your print vendor FIRST before even designing your piece and ask how they want the files set up and what programs they prefer.  Keep in mind with the advent of desktop publishing, not all printers can work with PC based files, and fonts do not transfer across platforms exactly (unless you use Illustrator, then you can convert all fonts into outlines, thereby getting around the MAC/PC font issue).