designers and large files? venting..haha

What rip are you using? We print PDF only in onyx and have never had that problem. Had it in rasterlink all the time though, even if you cropped a PDF to size in acrobat then brought it into RL it’ll still have the uncropped art board size. Made me furious lol.

As far as file size goes, a lot of “designers” these days tend to just be some guy your friend knows that is willing to pay for photoshop. We had one of them recently send in a 8’ x 4’ sign that was just a cyan background and black text that was 7 GIGABYTES. Yes. GB. And the font was naturally Arial and we redrew it in ten seconds and the file was like 76kb lol. The worst part about the 7gb file was that it was STILL PIXELATED!

With regards to real designers giving you dodgy/large files. Assuming people just do whatever is easier for them and don’t think about the next guy. Pretty normal for the times..

 

We get files all the time from the military that are made PowerPoint. Just comes with the job. We have to fix 95% of layouts sent to us. There are tricks of the trade the colleges don't teach these wanna be designers.
An 8' h x 24' w wall graphic made with Photoshop at full scale and 300dpi but they have illustrator too. Cyan background with black text! lol

 

I envy Signs365 where they basically require full size 100dpi JPEG.

About the PDF, in Flexi RIP you can tell it to crop the art to a few different options. This can be pretty handy if a file is exported properly. You can crop to the trim box and add bleeds in the rip. Or lets say the artboard was super small, you can set the page size to the media box and it'll include all artwork in the pdf.

 

This is one of my biggest pet peeves in this industry. You send over a beautiful, full size, vector file and they rasterize it down to 100dpi. I get that their system is probably automated and that's just what the programmer thought would be most efficient but it always sucks to see the stair steps on your vector fonts when they shouldn't be there.

 

Had a friend go to another “designer” recently as we were too OTT with COVID stuff and he didn’t want to wait - fair enough. Friend is a personal trainer.

Friend then came to us with said logo to Get some tshirts, business cards etc made and all he was given was a jpg. Designer only had photoshop and wasn’t aware that vectors existed.

Logo ended up being his initials + fitness between some raster element curled biceps (very cliche). Naturally they’d faded the text too and added in some splashes so that meant it was impossible to print on almost every graphic process known to man without a very time consuming redraw. (And it’d still be a huge PITA to use)

All in, he was super happy when I told him his logo was pretty much useless. I’ll maybe try find it in my filing system somewhere, you guys will love it!

 

Fortunately most the stuff I send to them is one time use 8x8 backdrops with logos scanned off business cards supplied by the customer. I can't imagine trying to get them to print anything high quality.

 

I don't care what they send. Extra time is extra money. A quick mock up gets an answer from them. If they buy, they pay for the trouble. Rinses out the riff raff.

 

They probably bought that $50k Mac. You know how designers can be

 

Ya know, regardless how big it is, ya almost always hafta go back and have them correct something, then ya hafta download that monster all over again. Working on a sign at 1/2 size from the designer for a 11' x 30' wall. Everything this guy does, ends up being big. I'm also doing some 18' x 24" 2-sided signs for him and those files hadda use We Transfer............................

 

Yes, same here, last week we received art from a customer 124meg (Photoshop) ...after I finished with it and got it ready for the printer...it was 1.72m
and we are using 8 year old computers running XP, so large files really are a drag!

 

If you can see pixelation at 100 dpi either...

A) Your eyesight is really exceptional.
B) You're standing too close.

 

All day long.
We have a good customer that really likes embedding huge TIFF files into EPS files just to crop them for wall murals.
I don't know why they can't just set/crop their artwork while they're still in Photoshop...

 

Quite frankly they do not understand printing. They have been designing to a monitor forever. "If it looks good on my screen it will print" Same reason why we have to correct 75% of the files we receive that have black in them...Because 400% density "looks the best" on my monitor....its a joke. Bill them system time and move along. At some point, someone in AP will start to question the designer.

 

Apples and oranges but... got a file yesterday from prospective client who has an art dept at corporate.
Please send me a vector file of your two lines of type logo so I can cut it in vinyl for your window. First file sent was png. Bitmap.
What file type?
Well Sir, most would be an eps or possibly an ai. Your art dept should understand.
Sent me a 10meg file as eps. lol.

 

I had a banner job for the rose bowl parade - they provided the art - it was on a double sided dvd - took 5 min to load no matter what I did . 4ft x 22 ft double sided . Turned out great just took forever to load and reload . Good $$ just another day

 

Whoever sent this to you believes you have the same resources as they do. Doesn't everybody? It could also be a case of 'leave it for the next guy'.