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DESIGN TIPS for artwork on printed balloons

Show us what you can design!

 

Artwork for Larger Commercial Orders of Promotional Balloons 

 Customers like to design their own artwork so this page is to help them produce a graphic that works best with my printing system. Artwork can be supplied as JPEGS, GIF's, TIF's, bitmaps, PDF's, RTF's or Word documents or just mail it to me for scanning!   

    Why not draw something in pen & ink? Or do a scraperboard picture like we used to do at school, you can buy the boards at art shops. I will scan it for you.

File Size: generally files smaller than 50kB will not have enough detail - something that looks O.K. on your website will not work when enlarged ten times and everything will have jagged edges!  This is an example of a website GIF : 

 

 

    For orders of 200 balloons or less we can take "risks" with artwork that is not quite up to scratch. Sometimes we can retouch it ourselves or re-typeset lettering that is not satisfactory.

However for larger orders the customer must supply us with high resolution finished artwork.

   For one-colour printing this means a black positive in any of the formats  listed on the left.  It must be high resolution which means the file size will be 300kB or more, depending on the nature of the image. All text will be included in its correct size and location and the the image will be in black and white with no greys or half-tones.

  For two or more colours we require a matching positive for each of the colours because a separate screen has to be made up for each colour. This is called separated artwork.

  In many cases we cannot give you a final quotation before we have seen the finished artwork. Delays in supplying finished artwork will either mean we that cannot fulfill your order or that rush charges will be payable. 

   Please contact us for advice if you are uncertain about this.

N.B. For  these larger orders we print in a circular or square area on the balloons so please bear this in mind and keep your image roughly square in format if possible. 

 

TIPS for producing artwork:

(applies to smaller orders only - less than 300 balloons)

 
  1. Keep it simple, not too many words or fiddly small pictures.

  2. Keep it "landscape"  My printer prints a "letterbox" area around about one-third of the circumference of the balloon so make your artwork wider than it is tall to get the maximum printed area.

  3. Avoid tiny lettering at the top or the bottom of the mage. The balloons are printed inflated so due to their curvature anything at top and bottom gets slightly blurred. We do our best but sometimes the balloons themselves are a funny shape!

  4. Avoid grey tones. I print in solid colours only. That means either black or white, nothing in between. Dotted or hatched shading is fine. I can sometimes process your image into halftones using a dot screen (as I do for the photos) but this does not always work.

 
This photo shows the normal area which my machine prints for smaller orders:  

For designers: print area shown on inflated balloon