The logo used on your website looks great on the site.
But
when you use it to get business cards printed, it looks
terrible. What happened there?
Graphics for the web and for print may look alike to
the
eye in some cases, but they aren't the same thing. Graphics
for the web are normally low resolution, bitmap (raster)
formats. Graphics for print are usually vector, or high
resolution bitmap formats.
Resolution is the dots or pixels per inch. A monitor
can
only show up to 72 or 96 dpi (dots per inch), so web
graphics use these low resolutions so that they download
faster.
Printed materials from a professional printer use 300
to
1200 dpi or more to show graphics, since the higher
the
dpi, or resolution, the better the printed item looks.
Downloading is not a factor in printed materials.
File formats commonly used for the web are JPG (Joint
Photographic expert Groups format) or GIF (Graphics
Information Format). These are used because they will
work with almost all web browsers, and they compress
the
information in the graphic for faster download time.
When
the file is saved and the format compresses it, some
of the
detail is lost. For graphics that are only to be viewed
on
a monitor which can't read extremely fine detail on
a
graphic anywaylike web graphics that works fine.
File formats commonly used for print are EPS (Encapsulated
PostScript format), or TIF (Tagged Image File format),
as
well as formats like Adobe Illustrator's native file
format. These are used because they do not compress
the
same way as JPG and GIF, if at all, so they retain the
fine detail of the original graphic. This works well
for
print items, because the file size of the graphics has
no
bearing on the size of the printed item.
Having an idea about how print graphics and web graphics
differ can help you avoid problems like horrible looking
business cards because of using a web graphic to print
them.
