A friendly q&a

design trends

Here are a few of the most common questions we get from our clients about design and media production. Do you have a production or other life question you'd like to ask? Send it to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Q. Is it OK for me to send my designer a photo I pulled from a website?

A. Unfortunately, the answer is no. Print files require a much higher resolution (300 dpi) than those used for the web (only 72 dpi). If you are working on a printed project, you should send you graphic files at the highest resolution possible with the minimum being 300 dpi—the higher the resolution, the crisper the image. Also, do no resize an image on your own as you may decrease the resolution of the image. Also, legal copyrights to images should be mentioned.

Q. ...Well then can I send a logo from a website?

A. Art on the web, whether it's a logo a photo or an illustration is generally in 72dpi. Unless we're re-purposing for use on the web we need much higher resolution files. Logos should be supplied as Illustrator EPS files saved as vector art.

Q. We just had an invitation for an event printed and we'd like to also send it out in an email. Can we just send it out as a jpeg or a pdf from Outlook?

A. Yes, but you don't want to do that. If you want to send it to a large mailing list, especially one that includes many addresses behind corporate firewalls, it's a good bet that a large number of the recipients might never see what you sent. Unlike web pages, email is stringently scrutinized by corporate email servers that must watch out for spam, viruses, and other threats. As a result, most email campaigns are composed and built primarily using text and html, the language of the Web. You can include graphics, but the main message should be displayed using standard Web fonts so they'll pass muster going through the firewall.

Q. Our website has a Flash presentation on the home page. Can we send that out in an email campaign?

A. No. For the vast majority of your recipients, especially those in a corporate environment, the mail server will likely reject any email with Flash or any other "executable content" as a potential viral threat. You may include a link back to your site, and you may include a static graphic of the presentation, but nothing can move and nothing can change within the email itself.

Q. I don't like any of the standard Web fonts. Can't I use the same font I have on my stationery?

A. Maybe. It is possible to use any font on a web page, but doing so can potentially cause your pages to render poorly or unpredictably. The standard web fonts are the standard because they shipped in just about every computer purchased after 1998, Mac or PC. You can use any font shipped with your computer, because both Microsoft and Apple now ship with an extended set, most of which are exactly the same. As long as the web visitor has a font like Goudy or Futura on their computer, the browser will render it.

We sometimes will use a technology called sIFR which uses Flash and Javascript to render headlines in pretty much any font you like independent of what's on the visitor's system. Most of the time, this can produce some beautiful results, but it can slow the rendering of the page, and if the reader does not have Flash installed on their computer, it will default to a web font anyway. In our experience, it also adds a layer of complexity to the page that can potentially cause unintended effects to the design. Also, it is not recommended for use at all in the body copy. For that, you're still stuck with the usual font suspects.