Free Artwork & Design Limitations

Sign companies, which we are not, are in the business of offering full service sign design, production and installation of signs and letters. They will, for a price, come to your place of business, consult with you, design for you, make changes to your concept, produce and install your sign. When you work with a sign company you can expect to pay double or triple the costs over doing it yourself.

We are a manufacturer and distributor. We manufacture for sign companies, design firms, architects, construction companies and the general public. We do not offer extended design services or installation. Our letters and logo's are provided to you on a do-it-yourself basis, and by doing so you can save money over having a full service sign company come to your door. Most of our customers either use the website to design their signs or they design it themselves using adobe illustrator, and send us a ready to produce cutting file laid out to their specifications. For those that need a little more personal attention, we can and do, up to a point, provide initial drawings and artwork based on your concept, free of charge. However, since we do not charge for this, and in many cases the initial designs can take over an hour to produce and conceptualize to a customer, there has to be a limit. We will not continue to make changes to any layout over and over for free. If you cannot appreciate that then we strongly recommend that you have a local sign company do the work.

We are sorry to have to put a limit on this but past experience has taught us that we end up giving away hundreds of hours of free design and artwork production which eats into the time we can spend on our other customers that require similar services. We have a limit of one initial concept, with two subsequent changes. After that the customer needs to rethink their concept on their own time, be assured of what they want in terms of font, size and layout, send us specific details that we will render one more time for free. If that doesn't work then you will be asked to pay artwork fees of $50 per hour for any subsequent work.

Under no circumstances will we send vector artwork to the customer. All renditions will be in raster image format.

Artwork Requirements

Cutting Files

True Type Fonts .TTF . OTF

YES.... We can use any true type or open type font for cutting operations. Attach to email.

VECTOR READY ARTWORK

Adobe Illustrator EPS and .AI Files

We require 2D vector artwork for all cutting operations. The preferred format is .eps or .ai made with adobe illustrator. Please save files as VERSION 8 files before sending them to us. This version converts embedded fonts and objects to lines and curves. Not all EPS formats are vector art. EPS made with or converted to photoshop are raster files and show only as rendered images. These files are not the same as the native vector art that it was produced as.

.PDF

Yes we can usually get succesfull vectors from PDF's.

.DXF and .DWG - autocad

We can use these files as a last resort. We dont care to use this format as the autocad font functions do not render text very well and most files end up being a series of lines without any curves. This makes for a lot of clean up which we charge for.

.JPG, .PNG, .JPEG, .GIF, .BMP - Photoshop etc

These types of files are image files. They cannot be used for cutting files but they can be used for calculating quotes on jobs.

CORAL DRAW

Please send files created with coral draw as .CMX

Fax

Please, no fax's.

Word processers - Microsoft Word etc:

Useless !