City Signs

Vectored Art files are files which are made up of lines drawn between points. Unlike image files, this artwork can be enlarged or reduced to virtually any size without any change in the crispness of the art. The proper term for that is "scalable". Most fonts are scalable, vectored art. They look just as clean large as small.

The best example is based on the method production for cut decals...
The blade on the plotter has to have a direction and a distance to travel
in order to cut each line. That information isn't present in an image file.

Some of the most common file types (or extensions) for vectored files are:

While we have many thousands of fonts available, if you have a very specific font that you already use, we might or might not already have it on our system. If you have the name of the font we can find out very quickly.

If we don't have the font, you can either send the font along with the artwork, or export the file to a vectored file type, converting the text to "curves" or "outlines."

Most of our fonts are True-Type Fonts (ttf) and we are running PC computers. (Mac fonts will not work.)

The easiest file to export to in order to automatically convert text to curves is .eps. This file type will not usually even try to embed a font.

If you don't have a specific font, just let us know what you're thinking about as a style and we can design whatever you'd like.

We have standard block fonts, elegant fonts, formal fonts, casual fonts, and even crazy fonts.

There are MANY programs out there that people use to create artwork for logos, signs, business cards, flyers, etc.

Some of them are proprietary and other programs cannot import or open the files. Some of them are easily opened or imported into other programs.

The most common proprietary programs are Microsoft's Publisher and Powerpoint. The least proprietary programs are usually Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Acrobat.

At City Signs, we use a variety of programs depending on the need and can import or open most file types in one way or another. Any of the file types listed above we can almost always open or import, along with many others.

When we do have a difficulty opening a file it is usually due to either the file having been created on a MAC or the file version being much newer than the version we have. The programs and versions we use are listed below.

If you want to send artwork for production, it helps to know what kind of files are best for different uses. The information below will help to identify
the proper types of files and formats to make sure your artwork is as clean
as possible on the finished product.

Image files are pictures. They are made up of small individual squares of
colors to form an image. The smaller the squares, relative to the size of the
picture, the better the "resolution" of the picture.

Some of the most common file types (or extensions) for image files are:

The higher the resolution of the picture at the desired size of the print, the better the resulting printed image. For a large print of 2'x3' for example, a
resolution of 150dpi is minimum. Even higher is better.

Most pictures and logos on websites are roughly 72 dpi at a very small scale.
We don't recommend trying to use those images directly. The images are
typically just terrible when blown up to a larger scale.