How do I prepare my pictures and send them as computer files for easy e-mailing?
For the best way to send us your computer files, you might want to follow these suggestions or consult this page for picture preparation:
- If your artwork is already in digital form, just "WinZip" your entire artwork files into one (1) WinZip-file and send it as an e-mail attachment to us at: mugs@mugnum.com
- If you only have "printed" artwork you can have it easily scanned into a digital format by many shops that specialize in scanning artwork very inexpensively, such as for example Kinko's.
To assure that your artwork can be reproduced by us in an acceptable manner, you should have your art scanned with at least 300 dpi's (dots per inch) and have it saved to disk in the .tif format. To reduce Internet transmission time, the size of your artwork should be in the final dimensions of the decoration. Normally, a "one side" mug decoration can be up to 3" x 3" in size and a "full wrap" decoration up to 3" x 7-3/4".
The PC industry-standard compression utility "WinZip" will compress computer files to an average compression ratio of at least 2 to 1 or even more, depending on the type of file you want to compress. That means that you can shorten the transmission time by at least 50%.
Mac users can compress their files with "StuffIt" to produce a .SIT file for the same purpose, which we will then "unstuff" with the StuffIt Expander for Windows.
Using these compressors enables you/us to transfer large cross-platform bitmap files between a PC and a Mac easily and without any loss in quality.
Should you not have a copy of the WinZip or PKzip applets, you can easily download them for free from the web. A good site for downloading shareware programs is: http://tucows.phoenix.net/ and directly from Aladdin's Web Site for StuffIt.
A note of caution: Use the JPEG (jpg) file compression format sparingly even though it "compresses" a file to a smaller size than WinZip or PKzip. Since JPEG uses a "lossy" compression method, each time you open and save a .jpg file, the compressor discards what it judges to be redundant data. The cumulative effect of repeated Open/Save operations can be noticeably degraded images.
This way to some interesting links to ceramics-related web pages.
You might also want to take a look at our new gift mugs web site