How to set up files for large-format printing

Full size or to scale

A 20-foot wall at full size makes a file that's slow to open and heavy to send, so most murals and wall wraps are designed at scale: 10% (the 20-foot wall drawn 2 feet wide), 25% or 50%. That's fine. The trick is making the scale impossible to miss.

Put the scale in the file name. Our quote reads it. “lobby-wall_10pct.pdf”, “mural 25%.tif”, “booth_1-10_scale.pdf”, “1:4” and “half scale” are all understood, and the quote sizes the artwork up by that factor — visibly, with an undo. It reads 5%, 10%, 20%, 25% and 50%, and ratios of 1:2, 1:4, 1:5, 1:10 and 1:20.

If the name doesn't say, the quote looks at the size. A wall file whose longest side is 36 inches or less, or a floor file of 24 inches or less, is probably built at scale, so the quote offers the 25% and 10% sizes to pick from. It never changes the size on its own. Window graphics are often built at true size, so for glass only the file name counts. An image with no size of its own — a screenshot, a phone photo — asks for a width or the measured space instead.

Or skip the arithmetic. Build at any size in the right proportions and enter the finished size in the quote; the artwork is scaled to fit. If its shape doesn't match the space, the quote asks whether to crop it to fill or extend the background to the edges.

Images in a scale file need more pixels

Everything in a 10% file is enlarged ten times on the wall, so a photo in it needs ten times the pixels per inch you'd want at full size; in a 25% file, four times. A photo at 300 pixels per inch in a 10% file prints at 30 pixels per inch on the wall — fine from across a big room, but too soft for a wall people walk past at 8 feet.

Enlarging a photo in an editing program adds pixels but not detail, so it won't rescue a small image. Start from the largest original you have, place it at full resolution, and let the quote tell you how it holds up at the size you're ordering.

Resolution depends on where people stand

There's no single right resolution for large format, because nobody reads a mural from 12 inches away. The eye resolves detail down to about one arcminute — a sixtieth of a degree — so the pixels per inch that look sharp fall as people stand farther back: roughly 3,438 divided by the viewing distance in inches. That's the rule our quote uses to grade every image in your file at the size you're ordering.

How the quote grades your images

A small image covering less than 1% of the artwork doesn't set the grade for the whole file. Vector artwork — logos, type and shapes from a PDF, AI, EPS or SVG — has no pixels at all and stays sharp at any size, so build everything people read as vector.

• Sharp, even up close — 150 pixels per inch or more at the printed size, whatever the product.
• Sharp from a stated distance — enough for where people normally stand closest: 3 feet for walls, 2 feet for windows, 4 feet for floors.
• Soft up close — fine from the typical distance, 8 feet for walls, windows and floors, but soft nearer than that.
• Too low for the size — below the typical-distance figure, and always under 15 pixels per inch, whatever the distance.

Bleed, trim and the safe area

Walls, doors and window frames are never perfectly square, so installers trim graphics on site. That's why the file needs bleed — artwork that runs past the finished edge and gets cut away:

• Walls: 1 inch past the finished size on every side, for trimming into corners, ceilings and baseboards.
• Windows: half an inch on every side, for trimming to the frame.
• Floors: none. Floor pieces are cut to the finished size and butt together.
• Shapes cut to the artwork: run the background a little past the cut line, so a tiny shift in the cut never shows a sliver of white.
• At scale, scale the bleed too: an inch at full size is a tenth of an inch in a 10% file.

Setting the trim and keeping things clear of it

Make the page or artboard the finished size and put the bleed outside it; in a PDF, those are the trim box and the bleed box. If the file stops at the edge, we extend the outermost artwork to cover the trim allowance, so a missing bleed doesn't stop the job.

Either way, keep anything important — faces, logos, text, a phone number — a few inches inside the finished edge, away from where the installer's blade runs and where the wall meets the ceiling or a door frame.

Panels and seams

Vinyl comes on rolls, so anything too big to fit across the roll prints in panels. Don't split the file yourself: send the whole wall, window or floor as one file and the quote lays out the panels.

• Walls hang in vertical drops, like wallpaper, overlapping by half an inch so there's never a gap. Each piece is up to 20 feet long.
• Windows overlap by a quarter inch. Glass is split at the mullions anyway, so measure each pane inside its frame.
• Floors butt edge to edge with no overlap — an overlap underfoot is a trip edge — in pieces up to 12 feet long.

Keeping seams off faces and words

Seams belong in open space, not through a face, a logo or a line of text. The quote draws every seam on your artwork, warns you if one crosses lettering, and lets you drag it into clear background; it stops at the widest piece the printer can make. While you design, leave a little breathing room between the important elements of a big wall rather than packing them edge to edge, so there's somewhere for a seam to go.

Panels come labelled A, B, C… in hanging order, with the overlap marked, so whoever installs them knows the sequence.

Colour: CMYK, RGB and spot colours

We print in CMYK — cyan, magenta, yellow and black — plus white ink. Files built in RGB, the colour mode screens use, are converted for print. Most colours come through fine, but the brightest greens, blues and oranges on a screen can come out a little duller on vinyl; building in CMYK lets you see that before you send the file.

If your file uses named spot colours from a colour book, we match them as closely as our inks allow — tell us when a colour must be exact and we'll talk through a proof. Transparency effects such as soft shadows and faded layers are fine.

White ink and inside-the-glass graphics. On clear and frosted film, colours are see-through unless white is printed behind them, so the quote adds a white layer for you. If you want control over where the white goes, add a spot colour named “White” to the file. For a graphic on the inside of a window that should read from outside, send the artwork reading the right way — we print it reversed. Lit graphics have their own colour quirks: see backlit graphics.

Fonts, vectors and cut lines

• Outline or embed every font. A missing font prints as something else and changes your layout. The quote flags fonts that aren't in the file.
• Vector for anything that's cut. Cut lettering and decals cut to shape follow the outlines in your file, so they need vector artwork.
• Cut lines on their own layer. Draw the cut line as one closed path in a spot colour named “Cut” or “CutLine”. No cut line? We'll trace one a small distance around your artwork and show it on the proof.
• One graphic per file, or per page. A multi-page PDF is fine: the quote shows the first page and lets you pick another.

File formats we take

PDF is the safest choice for anything with type and vector shapes: save it with fonts embedded and images at full resolution. We also take AI, EPS and SVG for vector artwork, and TIFF (including very large TIFFs), PSD and PSB, PNG, JPG and WebP for images. Files up to 4 GB upload straight from the quote, so there's no need to shrink a big mural to send it.

For the general rules of vinyl file setup, see The Job Shop's vinyl file setup guide.

What our Artwork check does with your file

When you upload to a wall, window or floor quote, the file is read once and checked at the size you're ordering: every image graded for sharpness at that size, missing fonts, RGB colour, named spot colours, missing bleed, seams through text, small text on one-way film, and colours that would be see-through on clear film. Each finding is pinned to the spot on the drawing where it happens, so you can fix the file — or decide it's fine — before you order. A proof comes before anything prints.

Not sure your file is ready? Upload it anyway; the check tells you what, if anything, needs changing. Or send it to us and ask.