Big Design
This article appeared in Issue 121 of InDesign Magazine.Alan Gilbertson shares his techniques for creating huge layouts for banners, billboards, and other mega-displays.
“It would be great,” one anonymous user on indesign.uservoice.com recently wrote, “if there weren’t size limits on documents.” This person was working on “a very large design for a trade show booth. … I have to do it in Photoshop due to the size limits of InDesign. It is taking so much longer than it needs to because every time I try to transform or resize something, it takes 20 minutes to complete a small task. Doing this in InDesign would be way better.”
No kidding!
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This is such a useful article! Thank you, Alan Gilbertson, for pulling all this together.
My way of doing billboards and other oversized pieces has been to convert everything to vector and then build it in Illustrator at actual size. I’ve also used On1’s Resize to get photos up to the size they need to be. Boy oh boy, is this a better way to do it.
Thank you again, Alan and InDesign Secrets!
Well the biggest doc size in Illustrator isnt that big its 5.777×5.777m thats not big atleast if we talk in terms of “being big”. Ive been using the scale method for decades or so.
Still i wonder how those big skyscrapper wrapping are done. Im wondering what dpi they use. Must be pretty weird one like 5-10 dpi or so. I mean making a document of 50×100 meter or so. Thats would be pretty cool man! I would be scared shitless if there was a typo in there.
I’m delighted you found it useful! All of the scaling techniques apply to Illustrator (and Photoshop, for that matter). You’ll find an excellent introduction to creating billboards in Dan Sorenson’s excellent “Photoshop CS2 for Advertising and Marketing” (Peachpit Press). It’s out of print now, but you might find a copy online.
Alan, I don’t do this sort of work so I was interested to read about the techniques you use and especially your description of the resolutions needed at greater distances; the more so as I have been following the debate on illustrator.uservoice in the thread, ‘Remove canvas size limit’, where many argue that having to scale is not acceptable.
To be honest, I think the attitude that “having to scale is not acceptable” is a symptom of the Age of (digital) Entitlement. Much like the idea that there should be a one-click solution to absolutely everything, there is no rationality behind it. It’s not as if working to scale is a new idea: It has been standard practice in engineering, architecture, art, and graphic design for at least 2,000 years because it’s practical, not because paper has size limits.
I sort can understand the need, but live on! Ofcourse it would be more handy. But the technical side is what lots of folks seem to forget. They simply dont understand what kind of S can go wrong using these huge doc sizes.
Plus lots of peeps have not worked in earlier design apps with way less features and thus perhaps are used to easily 1 click solutions. its like separating corn from cob
Thank you for posting this. I have recently started designing some larger pieces and this was posted just in time.
Aha! And there I was, thinking that my panic was from the editorial deadline! :)
Always glad to help.
Thanks so much for this, Alan! It’s comprehensive (and comprehensible). And it’s going to be a great source when people ask me how to prepare for giant stuff.
Thanks, Claudia! It struck me that “the big stuff” hasn’t had as much coverage as it deserves, and I’d been planning to write about it for a while. Even a certain well-known and essential book on Real World Print Production (ahem) that sits on my bookshelf doesn’t really get into it! :)
Nice article going to help going forward. My issues when doing these larger pieces is when the final piece is done and the boss looks at it closely and asks why is it so jagged and I have to mention that it will be 10′ to 12′ up in the air so it won’t look like that from the floor. It took me a while to get that wrapped around my head as well. Big printing is defiantly a different set of rules. Thanks for sharing.
Super easy solution. Make a proof print of a small part… walk outside and call the boss. Ask if it still looks jagged… result… Boss is happy and you got a nice stroll outside ;)
I dont have a subscription, but i guess lots of tech talk about working in scale. What a lot of folks seem to forget is when you work in scale, think about the dpi of your placed images. It looks like many folks forget to multiply the images when using downscaled versions. That can be quite a big print issue with very vague images
Thanks for the great article Alan.
When I tell my design students that billboards only need to be 25-30 ppi at actual size, they’re stunned (after an entire semester of working at 300 ppi). Then I continue to explain that billboards are usually viewed from moving cars. In order to see the pixels in this art, you’d have hit the billboard.
Hi Jeff. The original motivation for the article was the rampant confusion about “resolution” I kept running into in conversation and in online forums. The word means such different things, depending on context, that people immediately feel out of their depth. They avoid drowning by clutching at “300 ppi” as a conceptual life preserver, and then they don’t want to let go!
My idea was to try to replace the life preserver with a few good swimming lessons. Hopefully, I succeeded somewhat. :)