I was recently pulling an enormous amount of hardy Michigan weeds from our flower beds and was thinking that a before picture would be the perfect advertisement for a mulch company (we’re really talking about a lot of weeds).  All it would take is a picture of our flower bed and people would flock to buy mulch.

In this case, I think a picture would really be worth a thousand words – or at least worth a few dozen.  Often in your marketing materials, a good picture can really make the piece.  If it’s used right.

Too often, I have seen marketing pieces with pictures that weren’t done right.  Either the picture was too low resolution, or it was covered with text, or it just didn’t make sense why it was there to begin with.

Let’s start with resolution… I try to explain resolution and dpi like this… Imagine that your images are made up of marbles (dots or pixels).  You will only ever get that same number of marbles and if you try to make the picture bigger, you just stretch the marbles out and make the picture harder to see.  Similarly, if you take a picture that is 72 dpi (dots per inch) that is 2 inches by 2 inches and try to just make it 4 x 4 inches, you’ve just stretched those dots out and your picture is now only 36 dpi.

Most images you see online are 72 dpi.  Print quality is closer to 300 dpi.  If you pull a picture from online and try to print it, chances are it will be blurry at full size.  If you somehow found a picture that is a ton bigger than the size you want it, you may be able to shrink the size and end up with a dpi closer to 300 (think moving the marbles closer together or increasing your dots per inch).  Generally speaking, though, it is best to start out with an image that isn’t simply pulled from online (there are also often copyright issues with this, but that’s another post http://blog.greenottergraphics.com/2009/08/14/are-your-stock-photos-up-to-copyright-snuff/).

The jist of all this… make sure your images that you use in your printed marketing materials are high enough resolution to be sharp and clear so they actually say what you want them to say, as opposed to saying “look at that blurry unprofessional picture”.

Come back tomorrow for part two on what not to do when combining text and images…

Advertisement