Hi-Res: What You Should Know About Artwork

One of the first thing’s I will ask new clients for is ‘hi-res’ and ‘original’ artwork. And then I get a cheerful e-mail with lots of PDFs or JPGs attached. And then we have to have a discussion.

Hi-res is a term that gets bandied about a lot, but the easy way to think about this is Print Quality. Web graphics are almost always of much lower quality. They are highly compressed in order to load the page quickly but ‘compression’ means stripped. A large amount of information is removed using an algorithm designed to trick the eye and look OK on a CRT display. The moment you attempt to enlarge (or reduce!) such an image in any way, the illusion tends to fall apart and you have a real mess.

Original artwork refers to the file the designer used to create the piece. Most often, this means an Adobe application: Photoshop, Illustrator or Indesign. If I have that, you can be sure I have what I need to make your site look great.

The web dev wants the high resolution images, even if there are already web images for re-use because it gives us more options. You can re-size, re-touch or otherwise manipulate a hi-res image.

If you send camera photos, send the RAW camera data, not the image that gets converted when you load into your computer.

If you purchase stock photography? Try to get a minimum 300dpi resolution. That is the minimum resolution for print pieces. Higher is usually better—although the file sizes can be humongous. If the files says 72 dpi, beware! It is most likely only suitable for web graphics.