Banner artwork requirements

When preparing graphics for reproduction on large banners, it is important to have enough resolution (pixels per inch) to permit printing on a large scale.

If your graphic is created with a vector type of drawing program - like Illustrator or CorelDraw - then your graphic can be easily scaled and printed at any size, with no loss of sharpness.

Photographic elements, such as you get with Photoshop, jpg and tiff files cannot be scaled up to any great size without loss of sharpness and clarity.

The required resolution depends on both the size of the final banner, and the typical viewing distance.

5 to 10 feet distance - 150 ppi

10 to 20 feet- 100 ppi

over 20 ft - 25 to 75 ppi

In practical terms you are usually limited by the native resolution of the photo, which might be around 2400 x 3600 pixels for an 8 MP (megapixel) image.

With such an image, you can print an 8x10 @ 300 dpi for a very sharp print for viewing up close
or 2 ft x 2.5 ft @ 100 dpi for a wide screen TV sized print for viewing at 5 to 10 ft
or 10 ft x 12.5 ft @ 20 dpi for a wall sized print for viewing more than 20 ft away

Lower resolution images would either have to be printed smaller, or suffer from loss of sharpness.

Most banner designs include both vector graphics (such as type) and photographic images. Depending on the design, these different elements can be incorporated into a design using software such as Illustrator, Photoshop or Quark.

By using linked files with Illustrator it is possible to create very large designs which are also manageable in terms of file size.

Newer versions of Photoshop permit the use of vector elements, thereby gaining the scalability of vector graphics along with photographic material. Text objects can also retain font information, to allow sharp text at any scale.

File sizes for very large photographic images can quickly get too big to handle easily. Large photo files are best saved in jpg format in order to reduce file sizes. Be careful to use only a high quality setting (eg 10 out of 12) when saving as a jpg in order to maintain image quality.