Archive for the 'Tips and Workarounds' Category

5 Tips for Portable Tradeshow Displays

It should go without saying that slapping together tradeshow displays in Toronto is not an effective marketing strategy for your business. Unfortunately, too many companies decide that they need to start marketing themselves through tradeshow displays, without taking the time and effort to find out what works. The result is usually an eyesore of a display that is very effective at keeping customers away.

Reading the Signs: How to Know Trade Show Visitors Want to Buy

If you’ve ever participated in a trade show as a visitor,  it can be quite irritating to have salespeople descend on you the moment you make eye contact or stop for a moment at their booth. It can be enough to warn off visitors, which can be a real pain when you are the one attempting to drum up interest in your product or service.

How to Have a Great Trade Show Display

What do successful trade show displays have that others don’t, and how do you capitalize on your trade show display to ensure that you are getting the most out of it? Here are some tips:

Professional Design

Trade Show Display Tips

Getting ready for a trade show? How do you ensure that you, your team and your trade show display are ready to meet the challenge? Here are a few tips:

What are crop marks and bleeds?

If you’re considering printing brochures or postcards that have colour touching the edges of the finished piece then your printer will need a file that has bleeds and crops. Most layout programs today will automatically produce crop marks and allow you to specify your bleed distance.

Do you have a ‘Vector’ version of your Logo?

If you don’t have a vector based version of you logo you should!! A logo that’s in vector format can be scaled to any size and retain its crisp, clean quality which is important when you’re printing vinyl banners or trade show displays.  Most logos that are supplied to us are in jpeg or gif format which is bitmap or raster based and is dependent on the resolution of the image. I’ll quickly outline the difference between vector and raster based files.

Correcting Banding in Gradients

Banding issues in gradients  can be a problem in offset print and large format printing. We usually run into this issue when we’re printing large format for banner stands or offset printing for full colour brochures . The issue tends to be more prevalent when gradients are created in Illustrator  for output to large format printers.  Certain colour schemes also can be more prone to banding such as dark blue to light blue. If you’re creating gradients in Illustrator, Photoshop or Indesign you’ll need to make sure there are no banding issues before your artwork is output to final print.

Increasing Image Sizes for Vinyl Banners

One of the common issues that we encounter when producing vinyl banners or trade show graphics is low resolution or poor quality images. People will often take an image that is 3″ x 5″ and increase it to 3′ x 5′ and wonder why it looks really bad!!