Welcome to our Promotional Products Artwork 101 guide on eBay!

Promotional Products are an integral part of your businesses marketing and branding strategy so of course you want them to look professional. By following our guide we hope to educate you on the do's and don't when submitting artwork for your next project.

Paper Based Camera Ready Artwork

This style of artwork is less common now with the most of today's artwork being electronic (which we will cover later). Usually printed on vellum paper it is a crisp, clean, black and white version of your artwork that is to size and ready to be shot with a camera or scanned into a computer. Laser print-outs at 600 dpi (dpi = dots per inch) or 1200 dpi may work with some suppliers.

Items such as letterhead, matchbooks, faxes, or business cards cannot be used as they are not high enough quality to be reproduced.

Electronic Based Artwork

There are two common types of electronic artwork; Raster & Vector.

Raster images (also known as a bitmap)  are images made up of individual pixels and are commonly used for web graphics. Raster images such as .gif .bmp .jpg cannot be used as artwork for your promotional products. The two main reasons are raster images usually have a lower dpi which means a lower quality of print-out, and when you resize the raster image pixelization occurs and edges tend to get quite jagged thus creating a not so pretty final output.

Vector images other other hand are quite different. Instead of being made up of individual pixels a vector image is made up of mathematical equations which when resized maintain their appearance. That means the vector logo you use on a promotional pen could be resized to be used on a billboard without losing its sharpness.

Now if your saying to yourself  "I only have that .jpg logo on my website, I guess I can't put a logo on my promotional product!" think again. Raster images such as .jpg .gif .bmp and the rest can be re-drawn and turned into vector based art and usually at very reasonable cost (Under $20 for basic logos).

I hope this short and simple guide to artwork for promotional products has been helpful to you. Be sure to read our first guide "The POWER of Promotional Products" by clicking here when you have a spare moment.

Regards,

Ryan Schade - Promotional Printing Specialist

Our eBay Store: Big Impression LLC

Our eBay About Me Page: About Big Impression LLC