Print Problems

The official BagelHot key chain.

Today's mission was to visit the local print shop to fix some problems with my new business card graphic. There was something wrong. That's all I knew from a very vague answer machine message. Did I forget to turn off some layer? Had the data become corrupt? I decided to wake up early and take care of this problem right away.

I arrived at the print shop and found out the "Graphic artist" did not know how dots per inch work. My image was being imported at 350 dpi instead of 300 dpi. This kind of amazed me as the print shop has directions on submission of one's own art work. Why would an employee deviate from those specifications or more to the point how can someone in the print industry not know how to use dpi?

This isn't the first time. It seems there are a lot of people in the print industry getting dpi and image resolution mixed up all the time. Why is it that this isn't something that's drilled into your average graphic designer before anything else? If I had a nickel for every graphic designer, computer artist... personally I blame Adobe to a certain extent. Photoshop 4, to be precise, when they mucked up the interface for image size. In version 3 and below it was clearer how resolution and dots or pixels per inch were related.

After all was said and done, my graphic template made this weeks print run, and the graphic artist found out something new.