13 Jun What is Camera Ready Artwork?

In the promotional products industry and printing industry, you will often hear the term camera ready art?  What does this mean?  Well, it doesn’t mean that a camera is involved in creating the art.  This term means that the art is prepared to size and is ready to print without alteration.

For example, if you are printing on a Mini Football and the imprint area is 2″ W x 1 1/4″ H, the artwork should be created in a graphics program such as Adobe Illustrator and the artwork should be sized to exact size.  In addition, make sure your text is converted to outlines, curves, paths, or rasterized depending on the particular graphic software you are using.  This process turns the text into a picture so it will look the same on our computer even if we don’t have the same fonts installed on our computer.  Some common graphic programs would be Adobe Illustrator (preferred), Adobe Photoshop, and CorelDraw.