So you got a nice, shiny, brand new logo, and it looks great on your website.
Then you decide you want to put it on a flyer advertising your service, but when it comes back from the printer, the logo is all blurry, your flyer looks amateurish, and it looks awful next to the other graphics on the flyer, which are crystal clear.
What happened?
Resolution
The problem lies with the kind of logo file you sent to print. Did you grab it from your site and drop it into your design file?
Your logo will look great on your website if the resolution is just 72 dpi (dots per inch). The problem is, for it to look good printed on paper, it needs to be at or above 300 dpi.
Dpi isn’t exactly the same as the image size, but the image size will give you a guide to the resolution of the image—if it’s under 1MB, it’s almost certainly too small to print.
Image type
Is the name of your logo image followed by the extension .jpg, .png, or .gif? Those types are best for web and digital design. You can use .jpg and other files, photographs, for instance, but they need to be at least 300 dpi and big enough for the printing you’re doing—otherwise they’ll come out pixelated and blurry. For the best resolution and printing result, you really need a logo file with the extension .ai or .eps.
If you’ve got a good graphic designer, they’ll already know this, and they’ll supply you with the right file to make your logo print with crisp, clean, un-blurry edges.
Making print files
Generally, if you’re printing a flyer or something that will be viewed close up, it needs to be 300 dpi. Obviously, you can print virtually anything at any size, and that’s when things start to get complicated.
If you’re in this mess, you’re probably a DYIer. But it might be worth trusting a good graphic designer to do your flyer design for you, because they’ll know what size everything has to be to print out nice and sharply.
If you’re worried about the cost and whether it’s worth it, it’s pretty easy to weigh up. How much did that stack of flyers cost you—the ones you’ve just chucked in the bin?
