Clipkey Online Shop - for domed pc computer badges labels and decals

COMPUTER

Clipkey Products Tel: +44 (0)20 8390 5491

CASE BADGES

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ARTWORK TIPS FOR QUICKEST AND BEST SUPPLY OF DOMED BADGES, LABELS AND MOUSEMATS

We would very much prefer that you email us the original 'vector' file that created your logo. Please see the list on the artwork section. If you must send us bitmap type files like BMP, TIF, GIF, JPG or JPEG, please follow these guidelines below. They are mainly demonstrating that website graphics are rarely high-enough quality for our printing processes.

Here is our home button logo called 'home.gif'. It is 56 by 60 pixels, 64-colour palette GIF, 96 by 96 dpi (dots per inch resolution) and 1,983 bytes (2Kb) file size. Depending on your screen resolution, this graphic will be around 18mm or 3/4 inch wide physically on your monitor. And it looks OK! Clipkey Products - suppliers of personalised customised domed computer case badges, warranty, serial, barcode and port name labels, customised mousemats, personalised mouse pads, promotional Sportskey keyfobs keychains keyrings for sports running marathon events and swimming pool locker room key wristbands bracelets Keystraps.

BUT, we print at around 600dpi (dots per inch) and so if we want to print our standard 25mm/ 1 inch square computer case badge we want artwork that is 600 pixels by 600 pixels.
If we just take the above graphic and make it 600 pixels high on your monitor, it will look like this.....——>
Awful! And you will be able to see this on the actual badge - it will look as bad as a fax printout. So DO NOT just make your web graphic bigger. The graphic needs to be higher resolution - you need to 'resample' or 're-render' the graphic.
Computercasebadges.com - suppliers of personalised customised domed computer case badges, warranty, serial, barcode and port name labels, customised mousemats, personalised mouse pads, promotional Sportskey keyfobs keychains keyrings for sports running marathon events and swimming pool locker room key wristbands bracelets Keystraps.

SO, if we go back to the original source file (CorelDraw .cdr, in our case) of the above graphic and make a new graphic 'home2-256.gif, 600 pixels by 560 pixels and 600dpi by 600dpi resolution, it will look like this.....——>
Much better! And if we sample a badge with this quality, you will be much happier and will want to order straight away!
But it is now 94kb - OK to email to us but just as a tip, read below how to make filesizes smaller but keep their quality - optimisation you should do for website graphics, anyway!
Computercasebadges.com - suppliers of personalised customised domed computer case badges, warranty, serial, barcode and port name labels, customised mousemats, personalised mouse pads, promotional Sportskey keyfobs keychains keyrings for sports running marathon events and swimming pool locker room key wristbands bracelets Keystraps.

The above graphic 'home2-256.gif' is 94kb. It has a colour palette of 256 colours. If we reduce this to 128 colours, the graphic 'home2-128.gif' will be 64kb.
If we reduce further to 64 colours, the resulting graphic 'home2-64.gif' will be smaller still at 44kb. Of course, you can reduce further until the graphic's quality becomes unacceptable. You can notice with our examples how the image becomes coarser as various colours are removed.
home2-128.gif This graphic has a colour palette of 128 colours and is 64kb. home2-64.gif This graphic has a colour palette of 64 colours and is 44kb. You can see that the quality is still OK for a small web graphic but probably not for a domed badge.

Many programmes export or save designs as 'Windows Bitmap' .bmp files. Like .tif files, these are not a 'compressed' format. Certainly for the purpose of emailing to us your design, they are unnecessarily-large file formats.
If you have a design that is composed of blocks of colour, save it as a 'GIF' .gif format file. Reduce the colour palette if necessary to the optimum filesize for quality.
If you have a design that has graduated 'rainbow' areas of colour like our home button, save it as a 'JPG or JPEG' .jpg file format. With .jpg files, most programmes have a 'quality' setting when saving. This can be expressed as a range of 1 to 8 or, as with Corel PHOTO-PAINT, 0 to 255. The two images to the right are both .jpg files but there is a big difference in size. 'home2.jpg' has the maximum quality setting and is 124kb. 'home3.jpg' has a quality setting of 160/255 and is now only 41kb with little visible degredation. And you can see it is better than a .gif !
home2.jpg Quality setting on maximum makes this 124kb. home3.jpg Quality setting of 160/255 but no visible degradation and only 41kb!

Here is our home button logo called 'home.gif'. It is 56 by 60 pixels, 64-colour palette GIF, 96 by 96 dpi (dots per inch resolution) and 1,983 bytes (2Kb) file size. Depending on your screen resolution, this graphic will be around 18mm or 3/4 inch wide physically on your monitor. And it looks OK!
BUT, we print at around 600dpi (dots per inch) and so if we want to print our standard 25mm/ 1 inch square computer case badge we want artwork that is 600 pixels by 600 pixels. If we just take the above graphic and make it 600 pixels high on your monitor, it will look like this.....——> Awful! And you will be able to see this on the actual badge - it will look as bad as a fax printout. So DO NOT just make your web graphic bigger. The graphic needs to be higher resolution - you need to 'resample' or 're-render' the graphic.
SO, if we go back to the original source file (CorelDraw .cdr, in our case) of the above graphic and make a new graphic 'home2-256.gif, 600 pixels by 560 pixels and 600dpi by 600dpi resolution, it will look like this.....——> Much better! And if we sample a badge with this quality, you will be much happier and will want to order straight away! But it is now 94kb - OK to email to us but just as a tip, read below how to make filesizes smaller but keep their quality - optimisation you should do for website graphics, anyway!
The above graphic 'home2-256.gif' is 94kb. It has a colour palette of 256 colours. If we reduce this to 128 colours, the graphic 'home2-128.gif' will be 64kb. If we reduce further to 64 colours, the resulting graphic 'home2-64.gif' will be smaller still at 44kb. Of course, you can reduce further until the graphic's quality becomes unacceptable. You can notice with our examples how the image becomes coarser as various colours are removed.
Many programmes export or save designs as 'Windows Bitmap' .bmp files. Like .tif files, these are not a 'compressed' format. Certainly for the purpose of emailing to us your design, they are unnecessarily-large file formats. If you have a design that is composed of blocks of colour, save it as a 'GIF' .gif format file. Reduce the colour palette if necessary to the optimum filesize for quality. If you have a design that has graduated 'rainbow' areas of colour like our home button, save it as a 'JPG or JPEG' .jpg file format. With .jpg files, most programmes have a 'quality' setting when saving. This can be expressed as a range of 1 to 8 or, as with Corel PHOTO-PAINT, 0 to 255. The two images to the right are both .jpg files but there is a big difference in size. 'home2.jpg' has the maximum quality setting and is 124kb. 'home3.jpg' has a quality setting of 160/255 and is now only 41kb with little visible degredation. And you can see it is better than a .gif !