Questions and answers

When it comes to design, everyone has questions. At Extrabold, we don’t want anyone to be in the dark – knowledge is empowering and helps everyone involved the design process, including the client.

If you have a question, you may find the answer to it here – just click on the individual questions below to show and hide the answers.

If you don’t find what you’re looking for, feel free to send your question to us (go to Contact Extrabold) which will receive a personal reply.

SHOW ALL ANSWERSHIDE ALL ANSWERS

Graphic design − what’s it all about?

The whole point of graphic design is to combine the written and the pictorial to make the most of the opportunity you have to inform, convince, sell. If you’re promoting a company, product, service, event, whatever it may be, you want to make the best use of the space you’re using to do that. Strong, effective design can help achieve that aim.

I have a design requirement – what’s the first step?

Once you have an idea of what it is you require, just get in touch! Questions and concerns can be answered quite often by telephone or e-mail or it may be worth agreeing a meeting at a mutually convenient date to discuss your project in more detail. Remember, only actual project work is normally charged – consultation time is not (apart from mileage/expenses in certain cases by prior agreement) so relax, you’ve nothing to lose by discussing it.

Why should I use Extrabold Design?

There are many reasons why you should consider using Extrabold. For starters, there’s experience – experience can help speed the whole process up and make the best use of your resources, getting to the right solution more quickly and more than likely saving you time, money and heartache.

The Extrabold philosophy is to work in true partnership – the designer is not the ‘big I Am’ in this process – designers are there to use their creativity, skill and experience to create the right solution for you. All this whilst keeping an eye on the all-important factors of time constraints and budget limitations. So if you want to feel you are the most important participant in this process, and want to deal with someone who listens and is conscientious (as well as all that creative stuff) talk to Extrabold.

How much of the process do you handle?

From initial design concepts right through to production (e.g. printing) or any part of that depending on your requirement. For example, if you already have a printing company you’re happy with, that’s fine – Extrabold can supply design and then finished artwork to submit to your printer which will be in the correct format for the job (your printer will love this!). Alternatively, you can let Extrabold handle the print for you and save yourself all the hassle.

Similarly, if you have a web site design project but you already have someone in mind to develop the code and host it, Extrabold can design the front end (the bit that people see) working in partnership with your web developer to construct the site successfully.

How much will my project cost?

That will, of course, depend on the nature of the project and what’s involved. Regular clients often forego the quotation stage as they know they will always get a top quality job at a fair price.

If you wish, though, you can receive a full estimate up front in return for a specific brief, or a more ball-park estimate for something less specific. You can rest assured an estimate will be stuck to, so you know exactly what you’re in for come billing time.

In certain circumstances, though, it may be necessary to add to the estimated cost (if, for example, there was work extra to the initial requirement or a change in specification), but a close eye will be kept as the project proceeds and any potential overruns or changes, and resulting extra cost, will be discussed with you so you remain in control of the budget.

Do you charge VAT?

Yes, Extrabold Design is registered for VAT in the UK, so most invoiced work will be subject to VAT at the standard rate. There are some items that are zero-rated however (i.e. no VAT is chargeable), such as the printing of brochures, magazines and leaflets but this does not include things like business stationery (business cards, letterheads, compliment slips, etc) which is subject to VAT. Crazy, but since when did tax ever make sense?

What is the best file format for images?

That depends on the type of image and where it’s going to end up. There are two basic types of image – vector and raster (bitmap).

Vector images are made up of lines and fills and are in theory infinitely scalable up and down (the concept of ‘resolution’ is immaterial here). Graphics made up of solid colours such as logos, signs and technical illustrations are best created and supplied in vector format, the most widely usable vector file type being EPS, and they can be created using a drawing package such as Illustrator, CorelDraw or Freehand.

Raster images are built up using tiny cells of colour (pixels) and are used for photographic reproduction. Here, resolution and colour mode are of key importance. Resolution, usually measured in pixels per inch (ppi), determines how large and detailed an image will be. As a guide, images for the Web should be 72ppi at 100% size, those for desktop printing and slides (Word, PowerPoint, etc) around 150ppi at 100%, and those for digital or litho printing (for brochures, newsletters and so forth) around 300ppi at 100%. Images for exhibition graphics should be around 72ppi at 100% size (or 300ppi at 25%) unless there is no photographic content (e.g. type only) when vector artwork is best if available. You’ll find more on raster image formats under “Image issues” on the Hints and tips page.

Colour modes are generally either Greyscale (black, white and shades of grey) or RGB colour (red, green, blue) for everything except commercial print work where Greyscale or CMYK Colour (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) are the norm.

In the case of litho print and screen process, what’s known as ‘Spot Colour’ may also be used – see under “Colour reproduction in graphics” on the Hints and tips page for more on this and the other colour formats mentioned.

What is the best way to supply text?

In a rough order of preference, one or more of the following:

A word-processed document from a software application such as Word (preferably spell-checked!), saved as Rich Text Format (.rtf); a plain text file (.txt); one of the graphics packages listed in the next question; text written in or pasted into an e-mail; text from a web site you have permission to copy text from – supply the URL (web address) and specify what text you want to use from which pages.

It is also possible to extract text from a printed document – this can be scanned and processed using OCR (optical character recognition) software but beware: photocopies of photocopies will produce mostly gobbledegook – the sharper and cleaner the original, the fewer erroneous characters will creep in. Also, simpler paragraph layouts will enable better results – complicated tables are difficult for OCR to decipher. However, no matter how good the original is there will always need to be time spent cleaning up and correcting the resulting text.

If in doubt or you need more information, contact Extrabold.

I have some artwork I’d like to incorporate into a new project. What formats are usable?

For confirmation it’s best to get in touch, but as a guide InDesign (.indd), Illustrator (.ai), Encapsulated PostScript (.eps) Quark Xpress (.qxd), CorelDraw (.cdr), Publisher (.pub) and Acrobat (.pdf) are all usable depending on the version and the file content. Graphics can often also be extracted from non-graphics applications such as Word.

Results do depend on how the artwork was originated, so there are no guarantees but it can be worth a try! The alternative is to re-create the artwork; this is quite often preferable to be honest, and may be cheaper to do than you think. Again, contact Extrabold for more information.

What’s the difference between a font and a typeface?

A font is a specific variant of a typeface. For example, within the typeface Helvetica, there are the fonts Helvetica Medium, Helvetica Oblique (Italic), Helvetica Bold, Helvetica Bold Oblique, etc. The Extrabold logo was created using the font Harry Obese Squeezed, which is a font in the typeface family Harry.

In the days of metal type (letterpress printing) a font (or originally ‘fount’) was actually the variant of a typeface in a particular size – hence 12 point Helvetica Bold Oblique would have been an individual font. Thankfully, since the advent of computers and digitally-created type, this is no longer the case (no pun intended)!

BACK TO TOP