Posters with Xara X - Examples

[jclements]

Thank you XaraX.

In the last few weeks I've had two requests to produce 4' x 8' posters. This was a first for me and XaraX accomplished the task EASILY.

The poster with the lady was at 100 dpi and the one with the gentleman at 75 dpi.

These photos don't do justice to how clear and easy to read the posters were.

Perhaps this thread would be a good place to show other poster examples.


John

[jclements]

Thank you XaraX.

In the last few weeks I've had two requests to produce 4' x 8' posters. This was a first for me and XaraX accomplished the task EASILY.

The poster with the lady was at 100 dpi and the one with the gentleman at 75 dpi.

These photos don't do justice to how clear and easy to read the posters were.

Perhaps this thread would be a good place to show other poster examples.


John

[jclements]

And the other poster.

[roman]

Beautiefoolish!

[michael@mschafer.com]

I've done a couple with earlier versions of Xara, and I agree that it is an excellent choice of tools for doing so.

The first poster I did originally in Corel Draw, but it became so sluggish and took forever to load or save - I was spending more time waiting than working. I converted it to Xara and it was amazing how much faster it loaded, saved and refreshed.

The second poster was done in Xara from the start.

Both posters were for display at medical conferences and the people I created them for were pleased... I'll try to find the CD-R they're on and upload them soon.

[Egg Bramhill]

John
They are excellent! You couln't possible do a tutorial on producing and having posters of this size created could you. I for one would be very interested.
Egg

[John Rayner]

I will second that! Couple times a year we have a need for some nice large posters. Most of the time we just paste them up from leagal size printouts.

[Kman]

Wow, John, these posters are truly great.

A few questions :

Though they were printed at 75 and 100 dpi,
the letter viewing quality (and the graphics
involved) - was sharp, easy to read from a
distance and close up ?

What size was your xar file before sending
this to a printer ? And what dimensions
(such as 4000 x 8000 pix) ?

Did the printing service produce the poster
as a single piece, or was it "composed" of
several smaller pieces that were put together ?

Thank you for sharing this, John.

Ken

[jclements]

History on the posters

The one with the gentleman:

I created a 4' x 8' page definition XaraX with the largest margin it would allow me in the page defintion dialog. Then I drew the background design. I drove down to Willamette Print and Blueprint of Portland, Oregon with my laptop and asked them a few questions. While there I did screen captures of PowerPoint slides and pasted them into XaraX1 where they were sized and positioned. I then created a tif file at 75 dpi and gave the file to the print folks who opened it in PhotoShop and sent the file to their RIP (I believe its an OCE setup). I spent about 3 hours total doing the basic creation and placement of shapes in Xara and final tweeking of dropshadows, etc.

The blueprint folks recommended to me the minimum dpi to use. They said a big poster like this did not need a high resolution and, because they only had an hour or so to do printing and laminating, it would be too risky to try anything at a much higher res. I left the shop around 1 in the afternoon and never saw the final (we did do a small 11 x17 version to make sure the colors were generally close), by 10:00am the next day (Saturday) the poster was delivered (from Oregon) to Nashville, TN. Moreover, this was shortly after the first big hurricane hit.

The overall process was handled just about like any other job where the printing folks do not have Xara ... give them a bitmap file format.

The poster with the lady:

A very similar process as above, however, the conference committee had very specific requirements that had to be met. No font could be less than .4" tall (approx. 45 pt Arial or Times New Roman). No basic "picture element" (a graph or group of text or photograph) could be smaller than letter size. Those folks dictated all the basic format requirements.

I did create a preliminary file with bunch of fonts sizes from 12 pt to 150 pt and printed that on our office's HP1055CM plotter, and then tacked the output to the wall to see what was legible at a distance of 10 feet or more... the conference prerequisites were right on the money.

When I tried to print the entire poster on the HP, it choked. I tried "Print as bitmap" and "Print as a Postscript" directly from XaraX. Neither method worked, the postscript could only complete approx. 80% of the job and colors were drastically different that the bitmap version. The bitmap version sucked up too much memory and only got about 60% finished. That's when I decided to let the PROs handle it. I ftp'd the 100 dpi tif to our Atlanta office and where they took it to their print shop. That was late Thursday, by Saturday it was in New Orleans being displayed.

Amazing what the Internet does to facilitate business.

Kman, these were on one long piece of paper ... from a roll of paper approx. 4.5' wide so a 4' full-bleed could be done.


P.S. The big lesson here to be learned ... find a print shop that values your business and one that you can anticipate their quality and willingness to work together as a team. Also, treat them with respect, ask them questions, don't give them false/padded deadlines, thank them for a job well done, and come back with more business; you'd be surprised how quickly a real rush job can be done. http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

[John Rayner]

"Also, treat them with respect, ask them questions, don't give them false/padded deadlines, thank them for a job well done, and come back with more business; you'd be surprised how quickly a real rush job can be done. " - John Clements

We gripe and complain, but... These folks are working within their knowlege and experience also. CMYK has it's limitations, just like everything else.