"Laser Ready" Artwork
Creative Products Co. prides itself on its ability to engrave a corporate logo or personalized graphic onto just about any laserable product or surface. However, a graphic designed for full-color imprinting on a catalog or for use on a Web site may not be what's required for a two-dimensional graphic in one color.
Artwork is considered "laser ready" when it can be used for laser engraving without the need for modifications. When available artwork is not of a sufficient quality or type required, additional work and charges may be necessary.
The 17th century mathemetician Blaise Pascal once noted that there are two basic types of artwork to consider for laser engraving. Wait, what? He didn't? Dead for over 300 years? Oh. Ok. Well, anyway, we encounter both "photographic" art and "line" art when we do laser engraving or cutting. These types are sometimes called "raster" and "vector", respectively.
Photographic Art
Raster files are mainly used for photographs and images to be displayed on the web. The information in these raster files is a collection of the individual dots that make the image and can range wildly in quality, resolution (the number of dots-per-inch) and size.
Laser engraving these types of files also has a very wide range of qualities, depending on the artwork file and also the material to be engraved.
- For best results we prefer to use:
- the largest photo or file available
- resolution of at least 200 x 200
- light backgrounds work better than dark ones
- .bmp files are better than .jpg files
We recommend providing a sample part for testing purposes when using photographic art for laser engraving.
Line Art
Line art, also known as vector art, contains the geometric definitions for the lines and curves that make the image. These types of files can be used for engraving images as well as for cutting through a variety of materials.
The biggest advantage of a vector file is the quality of the edges of the lines and curves. Because of the way that they are defined, the artwork features retain the highest possible resolution when the size of the artwork is changed. The size can vary greatly depending on the original size of the artwork in the file and the size of the desired engraving on your part.
- For best results we prefer to use:
- Corel Draw® (.CDR) or Adobe Illustrator® (.AI, .EPS) files
- for engraving, curve outlines must be greater than or equal to .007" in thickness (>= 1 point)
- for cutting, curve outlines must be less than .007" in thickness (< 1 point)
- all lettering defined by fonts should be converted to curves
E-mail artwork to carol@creativeproco.com. Please include a contact name, phone number, order number and company name in the e-mail message. Files must be under 10 MEGS or please compress before emailing.
Lower quality artwork is produced by using business cards, letterheads, faxes and printouts. PDF, DOC, PUB, TIF, BMP, JPG and GIF file formats are acceptable but also considered to be low quality. We can usually re-create and re-draw them in the correct artwork resolution for a small fee.