There are several standard sizes of billboards used in the outdoor advertising industry. Below are some links to information about several of them along with some tips on how to prepare effective artwork. Also on this page is information on how to scan you photos, output film to send to us and other things to help you build your artwork.
| General Info | 8-Sheet "Junior" | 30-Sheet | 30-Sheet Bleed "36" |
| Scanning | Film Output | Trapping | Building Artwork |
Keep It Simple.
Keep major elements to a minimum and use as few words as possible. Typefaces should be highly legible styles. Make a bold statement about the product in a clean and quick way. Use bright colors as a way of catching someone's eye. Remember that drivers will not be able to stop and read your message.
There are allot of different file formats that artwork can be saved in. Allot of how to decide which one to use depends on what kind of file or artwork it is.
In general, if you artwork is just a picture it is best to save it as a TIFF file. This file format goes between platforms very well and has the option of using a non-lossy compression algorithm. It is also smaller than an EPS file even when not compressed. When an image is composited of different images on several layers it can be beneficial to send the Photoshop file with the layers intact so that if changes need to be made to only one part of an image only that layer can be changed.
Artwork done in a page layout or illustration program is a little more sticky situation. If you are working on a Mac. We can read the most popular formats natively. Namely Illustrator, QuarkXpress, Freehand and Pagemaker. Artwork done on a PC in these applications will usually go across platform well. One thing to remember is that Mac and PC fonts are sometimes different even if they are the same fonts. It is usually better to save the artwork as an EPS file with the fonts converted to outline and in the case of any program other than the before mentioned it is often the only way to get it to us.
When scanning an image for output we have some formulas to follow.
For files that will be printed on a billboard the formulas are:
Film output for 30-Sheet, 30-Sheet Bleeds and 8-Sheets - % of enlargement x 120 x 2 = DPI
Example for 30-Sheet Bleed using a 5x7" original - 10.437 ÷ 5 = 2.08 x 100 x 2 = 416 dpi scan
For inkjet prints that are not a billboard use the following formula:
Size of final print divided by the size of the original x 130 = DPI to scan at.
Film sizes and specifications are as follows:
8-Sheet, 4.925x10.85"
30-Sheet, 9.625x21.5"
30-Sheet Bleed, 8.39x17.88"
We require a film negative.
Dot Density:
A density of 4.0 is recommended for best results.
Lines per inch:
All film should be output at 120 LPI.
Highlight and Shadow:
Highlight and shadow in the reproducible halftone sections should be in the 10% to 95% range. In the shadow areas there should never be a dot of less than 5%. In the highlight areas there should never be a dot of less than 10%.
Elliptical or Round dots:
Dots in the 10% to 30% range should be round, 30% to 70% range should be elliptical (diamond) and 70% to 95% range should be round.
Preferably we like everything to be built proportionally to the size of your final output on an 8.5x11" page size.
This make files much less problematic and they will process in our RIPs faster.
It is not necessary to do any trapping of your artwork in your layout program.
When outputting film to send to us the trap width needs to be .02 inches.
For files that are uploaded and need to be compressed. We recommend Stuffit for Macs. We can also read ZIP files from PCs. When creating archives please do not make self extracting archive.
Black Generation - Black is best generated as a CMY-Black instead of 100% black. What works best for our
system is 100% black, 80% magenta and 80% cyan.
Fonts - Macintosh users should always include any fonts used in their artwork if they have not been converted to outlines. PC users always need to convert fonts to outlines. All files are opened on a Macintosh system and PC fonts are not compatible. We may have the same fonts in Mac format but there is sometimes slight differences in between the Mac and the PC versions.