Why would the file size be so big?

[ikarasu]

We do a lot of golf sponsorships. We just got one on Friday where they needed the signs printed by end of day monday, about 70 signs. We told them as long as they get them to us first thing Monday morning they can have them by the end of the day.

Here comes 70 individual files, set up 24 by 36, but they need them 18 by 24 with vertical flutes...

Those are the customers I hate. It was a quick enough fix, you just set up our rent

If every customer art file I received weighed 2GB I would be deleting those files immediately after production. The burden will be on the client to archive that artwork himself. Too often customers will use us as their branding asset repository, calling us up when they need a vector copy of a logo, even one they designed themselves. I'm not going to be accumulating stacks of hard discs like CDs in my music collection. The files I do archive are saved on at least two different physical discs stored in at least two different places. In the event one drive fails or the building burns down I'll still have my files. It's easier to keep that data organized and stored safely when it has been accumulated in a proper manner.

Hard discs don't last forever either. Periodically archived data needs to be transferred from an old disk (or discs) to a fresh new one. The computing industry is creeping toward phasing out the production of spinning platter hard discs and going all-in on solid state drives that currently aren't as reliable for long term storage. That could be a big problem.

I'm not a fan of storing massive amounts of art file data in the cloud. If your Internet connection goes down you don't have access to those files. Also cloud storage providers tend to charge more than $15 for "unlimited" storage. Google's cloud service offers 2TB of cloud storage for $10 per month.



The situation isn't that simple. And you're giving those "graphic designers" too much credit.

In my company we do a great deal of design work in-house because so many others on the outside just don't have the competence to do the work correctly. There are countless numbers of people out there doing design work and their qualifications vary wildly. Someone can get a copy of Photoshop via questionable means and then start passing himself off as a "professional graphic artist." Most of these people are just winging it. Very few of them know anything at all about graphic design for the outdoors (signs, billboards, vehicle wraps/fleet graphics, LED boards, etc). It's really bad how many don't understand simple geometry concepts like aspect ratio.

We rarely ever receive customer provided artwork that is truly production-ready. Most of the outside designers who seem to do more professional quality work merely provide us with the assets we need to lay out the artwork correctly and develop the shop drawings for production and to submit for installation permits.

Spinning disks have been going away for a decade. SSDs while larger are still way, way more per TB, so I don't think mechanical will go anywhere for another decade.


Google says 2 TB, but it's a little known secret that it's unlimited. I believe in their terms they even state if you have 5 users it's unlimited... But they've never cared about whether you did or not.

Yes, if everyone sends a 2 GB file itd suck, but how often will that happen ? Most of the time it's more work to get them to resend a file then to just fix it yourself (and on the list of things wrong with files, being too large is the least of my worries)

But yes, in house stuff is the best - we have 2 in house designers, 99% of our work is done in house... Customer supplied stuff usually gets checked by our in house designers and then fixed.

 

[GAC05]

As part of a monthly drop we get layouts for a cash mat that is only 15"x10" that are over 2gb. For some reason, we have really bad download times with these guys (3-4 hours) and it is easier to use the sneaker net by walking across the street with a thumb drive. Lots of times on the really big files the download will fail or fail to unzip taking up more time. I always rasterize the file down to a few megs so I don't end up giving my RIP hemorrhoids trying to push those bloated files out. Did I mention that these file dumps normally show up on a late Friday afternoon with a Monday - Tuesday install deadline?

 

[myront]

Just thought I'd provide an update to this. After receiving the first file for this project 2 weeks later I called a meeting with the manager of the project. The file I was sent is a jpg. So many wrongs on it I couldn't list here. Turns out the "designer" is a new hire with "marketing" experience and the project manager wasn't too confident with them as he too was told the file was 2GB, that was his first "red flag". Once he saw the file on my screen and we went over all the wrongs he was "floored". He will get me the elements needed and I'll just put it together here. Not sure what he plans to do with the designer? He himself has been appointed his new position and he just wanted to give the designer the benefit of the doubt. Probably will ultimately let them go. He will put something together in powerpoint, the only program that is authorized to be on his workstation. At least that will get me the elements and I can manipulate things.