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Oct 27, 2011

Why do you need to know about image resolution if you are not a professional graphic designer? If you are ever going to print something, put a graphic on the web, or create a PowerPoint presentation yourself, you want to know about resolution and why it matters for quality.

The jargon

First, there are some important acronyms to learn: DPI, PPI, and LPI are measurements that refer to the composition of an image.

• DPI: Dots per inch. Generally used in printing, this refers to the dots of ink on one line across one inch.
  

  Image via Wikipedia

• PPI: Pixels per inch. This term is mostly used for monitors and video production. A pixel is a dot on a video screen.
• LPI: Lines per inch. This is another print term that is mostly used for half tones and is the measurement of how close together the lines are in the grid.

In print, it takes lots of dots to make an image. In each space, a dot can either be black, or a color. In process printing (also referred to as CMYK), the colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow, and in combination with each other and with black it is possible to create thousands of unique colors. A yellow dot and magenta dot together will produce a tone of red. If you add a cyan dot the red turns to purple.

The quality of a printed image depends on two things: the capabilities of the printer, and the original resolution of the digital artwork. The higher the DPI and LPI, the better the image will look when it’s printed because the dots are smaller and closer together.

Size your images for their use

Don’t confuse image size with file size. The resolution and quality of an image affects file size, and file size can affect effectiveness for a specific use. If you have an image that is high-resolution and large, but reduce it to a small area and put it on your website, it will slow your site load times and possibly discourage visitors. All that extra file size does nothing to help display your image and only slows the loading time for the viewer.

sample image

Likewise, if you use a small image and make it larger in a report, it will distort and become pixelated or fuzzy when you print it. The poor print quality may require throwing away brochures and starting over.

My sample here is 1” square (and may appear a different size depending on your monitor settings), and is 96 pixels x 96 pixels. The file size is a mere 27 kilobytes (27kb) and loads quickly. To print that same image in a magazine or on a brochure, I would increase it to 300 pixels x 300 pixels to keep the size at 1” square and the file size would increase to 263k — almost 100 times larger.

Tools

Adobe Photoshop leads the market in image manipulation and production. However, there are many image editing tools and utilities available, including many shareware or free utilities included with your computer. These utilities generally allow you to crop and size images, and to save them in the most common formats.

One thing that you cannot do with most images is to increase the size and dpi at the same time, while maintaining image quality. There are tools that will “res-up” an image, but they create the missing pixels by sampling the pixels next to the missing area and guessing what the color should be to fill the empty space. (Vector graphics are an exception as they use geometrical shapes to represent images in computer graphics.)

Here is an example of what happens to an image if you try to use it larger than the resolution supports. (The first image does not have sufficient resolution for this size, while the second image is sized appropriately.)

low resolution image increased in size

proper resolution

Practical Tips

Print: for printing most things, images should be 300 dpi or greater at the final size. This allows high-quality printing with little distortion. You have probably seen what happens when a web image is used for print — the image becomes fuzzy. Images for newspapers can usually be at a lower resolution of 200 dpi, as the press does not produce as many dots per inch and the paper is lower quality.

Web: Use 72 dpi with the image at size. Any image with greater dpi will be reduced to display at 96 dpi or less. For presentations, you may want to use 150 dpi so your print outs are clear. The display or projector will still only present the images at 72 dpi.

Related articles

• Quality and Resolution Defined (dpageek.wordpress.com)
• DPI & PPI: Two Important Measurements for Designers (brighthub.com)

Sep 15, 2011

While under the proverbial marking and communications gun, I often say (well, whine, actually) “What we do is so subjective…” Usually I utter this phrase while trying to anticipate what a client will or won’t like, or in response to a client’s feedback that I don’t agree with or find surprising. I often think about subjectivity while we are in the throes of developing a conceptual print ad, webpage, or tagline.

Metrics aren’t subjective

But a little deeper thinking reveals that marketing and communications may not be so subjective after all. Take the obvious importance of metrics, which reveal the success and failure rate of marketing and communications initiatives in cold, hard objective numbers. Metrics let us know if we’ve won or lost — hit the target or missed.

Artists versus graphic designers

One blog I recently read even changed my mind on another one of my steadfast marketing beliefs, that “graphic designers are artists…” Not so fast, according to Bobby Hewitt, a digital designer based in New Jersey. In a blog post on this topic, Hewitt makes a very compelling argument that subjectivity taints the marketing process:

“Simply stated art is created for the artist and the artist alone. The artist paints a picture solely for the purpose of self-expression of how he or she sees the world. Anyone can look a piece of art and like it or dislike it. Art is subjective…

Design on the other hand is not created for self-expression but for a client with a particular goal in mind. If a design accomplishes the desired goal , for example to increase the response rate of a particular message by 63%, then it has satisfied its objective and purpose for being created. If subjectivity is added to the process of design approval the purpose of design has been completely removed and has become subjective.”

Snowflakes and marketing

Hewitt changed my thinking around a bit on the issue of subjectivity — but not entirely. As we have all heard and come to accept — every snowflake, every human being — is different. We sport different genetic makeup and experience the physical and social environments around us through our amazing, yet imperfect senses. Hence our opinions and our biases are formed, and change, throughout our lives. (Nature vs. Nurture, and all that!)

And so it is, when we work to develop a brand, a tagline, or print ad — we must take into account the unique identity, as well as business line, of our clients. Yes — branding, marketing, business development actions are taken to accomplish a goal, yet coming up with a “look and feel” and copy that is truly characteristic of our clients and their organizations must yield concepts that are unique and authentic, just as much as the human beings/clients themselves. So marketing and creative work is not about the creative person developing the concepts, but it is about the client — and allowing people to connect, on some emotional level, with that client. How much more subjective can you get?