The Promotional Gifts Guide – Artwork and Design Services

When it comes to Promotional Gifts one of the key factors that can influence the success or not of a campaign is the imprint – the printed items that will be placed onto your promotional items. These can include your logo, promotional campaign message and contact details. An imprint will off course vary from business-to-business but there are certain promotional industry rules that should be adhered to and very often the quality of the design service used to take your ideas to final artwork will be critical to the overall success of your gifts.

Some promotional gifts suppliers run their own in-house design studios rather than subcontracting to an artwork supplier or graphic artist. It is often easy to identify the former by how readily they offer a design service and tools to help the decision making process such as a virtual visual.

A virtual visual is a ‘mock-up’ of your imprint on a promotional gift image. To produce this requires a significant upfront investment in resources – IT hardware, software and the professionals required to drive them. With a virtual visual what is being offered is a ‘blank-page’ whereby a graphic designer will take all the elements for your design and blend them into a coherent one. Often this service is not charged for and should include the opportunity to produce variants and cater for amendments. However, expect a small charge if the service turns into a full-blown design.

So how do you brief gift designers to ensure you get what you want first time? The answer to this depends on how computer literate you are and the type of files you have available. What the design studio has to generate, as a final output, is the industry accepted standard for imprint artwork – an Adobe Illustrator (.ai) Vector file. The Vector-type file has become the accepted standard format because its contents can be scaled up or down without losing resolution – it is a mathematically structured file with each screen pixel having its own defined X and Y-axis co-ordinates, and the fonts incorporated as outlines.

The most common element in an imprint is the logo. This may have been produced by a third-party marketing agency. If so it should be available as an Adobe Illustrator (.ai or .eps) Vector file and your agency should be able to provide both colour and black and white versions. The latter is important because it allows for a single-colour print, not just black or white off course and this can help to reduce overall print run costs. The single colour version may also be used for engraving or embossing.

The problem for the promotional gift purchaser is that Adobe Illustrator is less commonly used outside the design, marketing and print industries. Under such circumstances, clients turn to the more readily available Adobe Photoshop. This software package is generally used for photo and image editing. It will produce what is known as a Raster-type file that will be incompatible with the systems run by promotional gifts printers. Raster-type files cannot be scaled up or down readily without losing definition and pixilation occurring. In addition the fonts used are not saved within the file definition (or as outlines) as they are with Vector files leading to further imprint reproduction problems if used.

However, from a Photoshop file a design studio should be able to produce a Vector file using tracing software and redrawing specific elements. Microsoft Publisher can also be used to provide the design studio with a brief as can Microsoft Word. The key is to avoid any tints and tones that could only be produced using an expensive four-colour print process and to include all the the graphic elements required – logos, text and graphics – with relevant notes including font types, sizes and Pantone colours.

Off course this process is easier if promotional gifts are considered at the design stage of a new logo and promotional campaign. Here you could ask your marketing agency to consider a ‘scamp’ not just of your stationery and adverts but also a range of promotional gifts such as pens, mugs, promotional stationery such as rulers and paper blocks and perhaps some corporate clothing such as fleeces and t-shirts. As these have each have defined imprint areas you can quickly see if the proposed logo design is going to work within the space provided in either a landscape or portrait format. A further aspect to consider is the ‘readability’ of the imprint in terms of font size and also its orientation in the imprint space available i.e. whether it is tall or wide.

The design services provided by a gifts company should enhance the overall quality of your promotional items and remove the most common problems associated with the generation of printer acceptable artwork.

About the Author

Dawn Koffler is the MD of Redbows Ltd – one of the UK’s leading promotional gift suppliers. Redbows started in 2005 and has experienced tremendous growth in its internet related activities. As well as running her own business Dawn is a working mum, house renovator, taxi driver, life-coach to 3 wonderful kids and somewhat eccentric husband, and dog trainer. Dawn also writes the Promotional Gifts Blog and provides marketing consultancy and services to an ever growing client base.

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