What the heck is a JPEG and do I even need one?

So you have designed your logo or other elements of your look and feel or had someone design them for you. As we discussed in our recent blog The Many New Faces of Your Logo, logos or similar graphic elements should first be designed in vector format so they will be fully scalable up or down and will meet any of your future design sizes and needs without compromising the quality of the graphic. But there are so many other things to consider. For example, you can’t use an .eps or .ai vector graphic on a website or on your blog. So what the heck is a .gif and a .jpg? And, when should you just use a Word doc with your graphics or photos inserted in them (hint: NEVER!)?

As graphic designers we’ve seen it all. We often receive logo files or ads to place in conference program books, on websites, in collateral and the like, and we receive everything you can imagine. We’ve seen teeny, tiny low resolution photos, small ads that are actually small graphics with a lot of white space around them in an 8 ½” x 11” file, and yes, even graphics placed in Word documents. It’s important that businesses understand the importance of your graphics and what formats you will need in order to assure your brand is always best representing you. If you use a graphic designer, be sure they know your needs and goals so they provide you with all the files you need up front.

Following are some graphic dos and don’ts as well as some different graphic and photo formats, each with a small explanation of what they are and when they might be needed.

Graphic Do’s

• Do know the basic graphics formats you will need
• Do get your files from your graphic designer (they are YOUR graphics!)
• Do hire a graphic designer if you don’t have the talent in house to look your best – it will cost you less in the long run!
• Do use high resolution photos and vector graphics for your printed materials

Graphic Don’ts

• Don’t design your look and feel, logos, ads, or other collateral in Word or some other non-graphic program
• Don’t stretch photos, resize them
• Don’t use photos or other graphics off the web for your printed materials
• Don’t ever take a low resolution graphic, turn it into an .eps and think it will be high resolution

Basic Graphic Formats for Small Businesses

AI - Adobe Illustrator's metafile format. This is the native Illustrator file type and is a vector format. You can create .eps files from an .ai file.

EPS - Encapsulated Postscript files can be created using Adobe Illustrator plus a host of other software programs. If the original file is a vector file, your .eps will be vector as well. This is a common graphic file type and you should have a vector version of your logo (in multiple colors!) as an .eps so it can be sized up or down to meet any need.

GIF - Graphics Interchange Format  is a very efficient and still quite popular picture format. GIF animations are a popular form of Web multimedia, because they're small and display in most current browsers without needing a special plug-in or taking up many computer resources. GIF’s only have 256 colors, or 256 shades of grey. This is a format you may want to use for online graphics, but not for your print materials.

JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group), commonly called JPEG and with the filename extension .jpg, can be an efficient image type. Your digital camera may save files as JPEGs. JPEGs can be optimized and some of their data discarded so they can be useful for web-based applications. JPEGs can also support CMYK (four color separation) so they can be used in printed materials as long as the resolution is high and the compression is low.

PNG - The Portable Network Graphics format, pronounced "ping". We like .png files for use on the web because they can have a transparent background and still have a high resolution at a low file size.

PSD - Adobe Photoshop's native format, which stores all of its layers, selections, and miscellaneous other image data. This is a source file similar to AI.

TIF - TIFF stands for Tag Image File Format. TIFF is a very popular professional graphics format used for printing because it allows for CMYK separation with out compression.

There are many, many other graphic file formats, but these are just some of the basics that may be helpful as you run your business and work to put your best brand forward every day. Do you have all the graphic files you need?

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Kerry Brooks is Co-owner of ProfessionalEdge Associates, offering a wide range of marketing and support services to businesses that want to increase their success, but aren't in a position to add to their staff. Visit the ProfessionalEdge website at www.gettheprofessionaledge.com, email info@gettheprofessionaledge.com, follow them on Twitter @profedge, or like their Facebook page.