File Formats
and Printing

*important download

As a customer of Global Design you will be receiving files in various formats.  Which files can you or your Printer use?  This page will help you understand different file types, and help us determine which formats you require.  It may also help you understand some of the terms your printer uses.

Printing has been going on for thousands of years.  It was around a long time before Johann Gutenberg (a famous 13th Century printer) came along.

New Tools

Photography was invented 1.5 centuries ago, and gave us film.  This led to CMYK printing.  If you look closely at a color brochure you will see many tiny dots, colored either cyan, magenta, yellow or black (CMYK).  When these overlap each other they create an infinite variety of colors and tones.

If you stand ten feet or more away from your monitor, you will notice the two images above look identical.  For better examples of this, click here.

To print your artwork, a Printer needs to make negatives for each of the four colors used.  For 3-color, 2-color or single color printing, printers need a corresponding number of negatives.  Single color printing is cheaper since only one negative, one ink and one print run are required.  Full color printing requires four negatives, four inks and four print runs.

File Types

File formats are often created for use by a specific application.  For example, images created in CorelDRAW are stored as .CDR files.  Some formats are more generic, such as the .TXT format, which is an ASCII file not associated with any specific application.

Some of these files are bitmap, some vector.  A bitmap is an image made up of pixels, as is a photo.  The most commonly used bitmaps for professional printing are EPS and Tiff bitmaps.  For the web we use Jpegs and Gifs, which are much lower resolution.  These look fine on screen but are not suitable for printing.  Bmp files (Windows bitmaps) are often used in computer programs - like word processors, as are Wmf's (Windows Metafiles).  Photoshop is an bitmap editing program.

Vector programs allow you to edit drawings, which are assembled using lines and fills rather than pixels.  The beauty of a vector drawing is that it takes up little memory and can be scaled up and down without losing clarity.  Xara, CorelDRAW and Adobe Illustrator are examples of the world's best vector art programs.

The image, "Trythis"

We have prepared a small, self-extracting zipped file for you to download.  'Trythis.exe' may be downloaded at the bottom of this page, and will unzip the image above into the following formats:

You might like to see which of these you can open, and which files your Printer would prefer.  We can also send many other formats.

Click here to download Trythis.exe (281 kb).  Once the file is downloaded to your hard drive, double click it to activate..

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No text, artwork or images may be downloaded, copied, transmitted
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