Design of Roll Ups, display systems and exhibition stands

How to design a good advertisement for display system?

Large pictures are large because they are read fast from far away, not because you can write a whole story on them. Stories are for movies or bookshelves. Don’t put more info on e.g. a Roll Up than kan be read in 3 seconds or less.

A great composition of the print brings out the most important information. Put that on the upper 50% of the canvas. Branding is for big budgets, if you sell product A or service B then make it selling for your stand. Don’t use up the space on just showing your logo. Sell your product A or service B instead. All of Ekspofabrika sold TETRIX products you can change the printed canvas on, so it is easy to also change your marketing message instead of designing something that “will last forever”. Nothing does.

Dark backgrounds on prints with negative text (light text on dark background) may look really good and enhance the brand. However it is most common on e.g. Roll Up designs. The human eye reads dark letters on light background better. To quote the advertising guru David Ogilvy: “If white text on black pages would be better, they would print books that way.”

The right photo, resolution and format on Roll Up or Banner

A good picture tells more than a thousand words, but a bad picture just looks bad. Use only pictures that can tell a story. Unclear, out of focus pictures does not get better if printed big and a sharp 0,5 Mb photo is always better than a 250 Mb unsharp one. Size of the file is secondary to composition.

RGB and CMYK and color profiles in print, and understanding them is crucial for getting your photo to look good in print. Expofabrika always prints in CMYK, this means 4-color print. What you see on your monitor is always RGB, this is a different color mode which requires that the monitor is on and has a back-light that enhances the colors. We an only print CMYK (not RGB or PMS eighter) – only.

CMYK is short for the 4 colors that we mix to get hundreds of shades, yet RGB colors, a photo on your screen can show more colors than our print. Shortly said; when you put on your monitor you see RGB colors, when you turn of the monitor you see CMYK color black.

Resolution of the photos when printing

Our printers can not print sharper than 150 dpi so it is not fruitful to send in higher resolution. Your monitor just shows 72 dpi so if that resolution is good enough for you it will be more than OK also for print. As a matter of fact a low raster picture might look sharper at some distance. 50-100 dpi is quite enough for e.g. a Roll Up and 40-50 dpi is enough for a road-side banner. If you make a PDF of a pic and look at it at 100% size on your monitor it will be as sharp as in print.

Send artwork as jpg/jpeg and setting large file when saving. PDF can be allowed as long as all text is vectorised prior to sending and if all of the color settings are OK.

Color management and profile in printing

Change your design to CMYK and change the color profile (color preference) to: Euroscale Coated 2 or FOGRA27 (ISO). All artwork sent to us will be checked to CMYK and the profile will be change without notice. Color variations that occur due to changing into CMYK prior to printing.

Make sure that the color filling is at least 30% to appear in print. Small color gradients do not necessary appear in print if the difference between color depth is too small. For deep colors like black it is not necessary to add colors. C0% M0% Y0% K100% gives a black enough filling for getting a black color. The printer might refuse artwork where colors are over-used as it might cause flaky outcome of print areas and the drying time for prints is prolonged unnecessarily.

Every printing media is a bit different. To expect the colors on a screen and on the print to be 100% the same as lightning varies and the print materials differ. Printed at us and with the right color management the differences are minimal, as we always stick to the same machines, colors and media. However the whiteness difference of two prints from different printhouses with all the same machines and prepress work might still differ depending on the brand of color used and different whiteness of the media that the ink is put on.

Checking and preparing the layout before sending your file for print

We prefer that all artwork is sent to us in jpg/jpeg format. Prepare your artwork in a program that can manage CMYK color. Change your design to CMYK and change the color profile (color preference) to: Euroscale Coated 2 or FOGRA27 (ISO). Below a little list of things to check before sending your artwork.

You should make sure that:

  1. The artwork is in CMYK mode and sent as JPG/JPEG
  2. That the color profile is “Euroscale Coated V2”, “ISO Coated” tai “Fogra 27”
  3. That the design follows the print sizes mentioned
  4. That no bleed markings or cut marks
  5. That the resolution is sufficient 75-150 ppi (dpi)
  6. That the color depth is adequate +30% to be visible on gradients
  7. That no color fills are used without over-using color fill unnecessarily