“Can you use this image?” That is a question every designer has heard with every project. Many times, we have to say no and have our clients go back to their computers and try to send us something that we can use.

We blame computers. One hundred percent. Because on the screen, every picture looks good, no matter what camera it was taken with, no matter what the size is.

For a website or an email project, any photo will do. When it comes to creating a printed product, though, we – the designers – can be very picky about our photo material.

There is a huge world of difference between images that are meant to be published in printed materials (such as business cards, brochures, books, and magazines) and those that are displayed on the Web. The main difference is in the resolution. I am sure all of us have downloaded a photo from the web, enlarged it in our Word document, saw how great the document looks – only to find that after printing it out, it looks so blurry that we cannot recognize it.

“Resolution” really means “size”.

For printed products, such as brochures, flyers, and booklets, the larger the better. For electronic projects, such as websites, social media, blogs, and emails, it is the opposite: the smaller the better (within reason of course).

Some pitfalls to avoid:

1.    Never place images into a Word or PowerPoint document in order to gather them and send to your designer. Once images are embedded in Microsoft Office documents, they lose quality exponentially.

2.    On the same note, enlarging images in any software will not increase their quality; in some cases, improper settings while re-saving the image may decrease the quality even more.