: Jargon: What do company ad departments call the vector files? As someone laying out an event program or the like for an amateur production, I need to call the sponsors and ask for the print-layout

@Rambettina927

But a good sized business that has a corporate brand effort with logos
in ai files and detailed instructions for placement... "some guy"
working in department X doesn't know that. When he passes the request
up to the right department, to the people who do know about preparing
material for print and other uses, what do they call this?

Is it a "comp"? Is it a "for-print capsule"? I want to know what they
call this (along with the dimensions) to effeciently ask for the right
thing and sound (to them) that I know what I'm talking about.


You should ask for logo ready to be use for printing in CMYK, ideally vector formats. A good marketing department should know what you need and care to give you the best quality possible because they want to look good. To my knowledge, a person who has to send a logo and knows about quality will ask you "what do you want to use the logo for?" and send the right file. Already when you mention "a logo for print purpose", that person will know what are the requirements. I don't know if there's an EXACT term but anyway, trying to find one term to mean a few things might not help you and simply confuse people even more.

People get confused because you say they only see thumbnails.. well the designer who gave them these logos should have identified each of them properly so even a monkey knows what to use.

Have a look at the comments on the following answer, you will see that clarity isn't a concept shared by all designers (Industry standard file format deliverables for logos?) so it's normal the people who didn't prepared the files or don't know a vector is better than a PNG will be confused. So you need to guide them since the designer didn't. As I said in one of my comment, there's people who simply have no clue and you have no choice but to educate them on this.

After asking for a logo in vector or with a print quality (high resolution), the best is to do like most online printers do and prepare a requirement sheet and send it by email with your request. It's very professional, it's precise and there's options.

That sheet should have at least 3 options, starting with the top quality one, and it should be mentioned which one is the best.


with vectors, it should be specified which file formats are good vectors, to have the text vectorized or fonts included,
and if spots should be converted to CMYK or not.
with high resolution, it should be mentioned what's the minimum size, the
color space, and file format.
for anything else, ask for the native file and a PDF. In worse case
you can always try to extract that logo from the PDF or print/scan
it.

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@Gail6891361

I once made a survey in my class about image formats (I teach engineers). Most did not know of any other format than jpg, some knew PNG. It didnt occour to most of the students that images could be anything other than photographs. Its not like they are not aware of PDF or in other formats they just dont think in similar terms thus unable to comply.

The above explains why many people have hard time providing a good solution. They need some help mentioning the format can help them expand the search appropriately. Using terms such as high quality can also help them narrow things down. Just dont get too technical. Mentioning things like DPI, color space and such is just going to confuse most clients, worse a industriois client can comply by interpretting the request completely wrong.

Unfortunately, this is how the world is. Theres not much we can do about it, learn to live with imperfections and you will become great. Dont learn and you will have problems.

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@Gail6891361

Everything that has been said is right on point. The dialog that you should have is"

"I need all of your design assets for this project. I need your logo in a vector or high resolution format in order to print it correctly. I need all images in high resolution. I need all licensed fonts you intend to use. If you don't have these assets in the proper format, I will work with what you have but I can not guarantee they will reproduce properly in the finished product."

You might want to have them sign off on a sample of the finished product especially if they didn't have the correct assets. If something prints blurry because they gave you a 72dpi image they pulled from the web that is not your fault but you better believe they will come back and complain.

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@Holmes874

I'd ask for "your logo in a vector file format. This may be an EPS, PDF or SVG file".

But be prepared to accept the fact that a lot of these businesses likely don't have a version of their logo in a vector file format. In fact, you'll often encounter businesses that don't even have a proper digital source file of their logo. Getting 'scans from yellow pages' and low quality JPG files is certainly common when it comes to dealing with small businesses that have never really properly invested in their brand assets.

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