If you require hoarding design support, or you need someone to put your ideas into a printable format, we are here to help.
Our experienced designers can put together your hoarding design at a cost of just £25 per hour. We can give you a quotation based on your brief based on how long we think it will take to produce a hoarding design.
If you are designing yourself we’ve offered a few design tips below. Or if you’ve had a printed hoarding site survey, our designers will create a a scaled blank canvas for you. This scale diagram (usually in Adobe InDesign) will indicate the fall of the ground and existing hoarding and any obstructions. It enables designers to create flowing graphics and text easily.
We can print graphics to fit any sized hoarding. We can print directly to boards up to 3 metre in height and 1.5 metre wide, though the most popular and standard hoarding panel is 1220mm x 2440mm (4ft x 8ft).
The image below shows the steps that go towards designing the hoarding panels, with keen attention paid to bleed to ensure that panels line up correctly. This ensures that your message is not obscured and is easily legible by any potential customer. (click for full size.)
Hoarding Design Tips.
Designing hoarding graphics across wide areas can often be a departure from the norm for most graphic designers. We have, therefore offered a few tips from our pre-press manager below. Where possible it is recommended that you contact us first before you start designing, we may just save you some time!
If the hoarding is on an incline or is uneven in any way, use a scaled site survey diagram to set final artwork. We offer a free site survey where we will measure up the existing hoarding structure. From this we draw up an InDesign or Illustrator file showing the position of each printed hoarding graphic.
If measuring your own site, don’t forget to take into account obstructions such as lamp posts or bus shelters that may just cover your message just where you need it.
Artwork.
If you use one of our InDesign or Illustrator templates we will instruct you how to supply the artwork.
If you are creating artwork without a template then artwork should be supplied as a pdf file with all fonts embedded or outlined, with 10mm bleed on all sides, and with all images at an appropriate resolution – see below. Do not put anything on the artwork that you do not want to be printed. Do not create a separate file for each panel. Please accompany the artwork with a mockup of the final hoarding, showing all the panels in order.
Like all printers, we print in CMYK process colours, and you should use cmyk in all your artwork. If you use any RGB or LAB colours we can still print it, but you run the risk that some colours which you can see on your screen simply cannot be reproduced in print.
You can work at a scaled down size if you choose – you will find it easiest if you choose a simple scale such as 25% or 10%.
Image resolution
Use vector images where possible – resolution is not an issue with vector images.
You will be creating very large files, so avoid having image resolutions larger than necessary.
At the final print stage, absolute top quality images will be achieved from a resolution of 100dpi. Any higher resolution than this will only result in larger file sizes and will not improve the image quality. For hoardings you will get a perfectly adequate result from 50dpi, and if the public will be any more than 3 metres away then 25dpi will be enough.
So – if, for example, you are working at 25% scale we will be enlarging your artwork by 4 times, so you will need to place images at 4 times the desired resolution.
Need more help?
Our team are available to discuss your artwork at any time. If you need to book a site survey to acquire a scaled Indesign diagram, please call 01625 435130.