Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten Cop

I work at a digital printing company. My responsibilities include the release and scheduling of the majority of our work, as well as being the point person on our second largest client. However, my friends and family seem to think that all day long I'm secretly hoping one of them will give me a "fun project" to spend my endless amounts of free time on.

Since I will likely never escape this rigmarole, I might as well drop some basic file knowledge on you, for both of our sakes.

Screen resolution: DPI stands for Dots Per Inch. Almost any image you are looking at on your computer screen is 72 DPI. 72 DPI is known as "screen resolution" and it's used because it looks good on a screen. If you go any bigger than that your file will become unnecessarily large and not load quickly. When you upload a picture into the "GiRlS NiGhT OuT!!1" album on Facebook, even though your camera has taken a high-resolution picture, Facebook will downsample your image to 72 DPI. They do this to save space and load pages faster. Plus they'd have to buy more Internet Tubes if they wanted to keep all those images at their original size.

Printing resolution: Printers require a much higher image resolution. We recommend all of our clients send us at least 300 DPI images. You can go higher than that but once you get past 600 DPI you won't see any noticeable differences.

If you ask me to print you some huge collage and you send me a picture from Facebook, I will bury you alive. Send me the original picture or it will print blurry.

Designing for Print: since this is a 101 post, we'll be brief. Computer monitors output colors in RGB (red, green, blue). Printers lay down ink in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black). Any design program worth its salt will have options that allow you to change your color mode to CMYK. Unless you seriously tweak your monitor, you will never be looking at actual representations of how colors will print, but you will at least be closer to the real thing. And when you send me your file, it will already be in CMYK. When printers interpret files that are in RGB, they say "F you, RGB!" and they just convert it into CMYK anyway.

There's plenty more to cover but since I have endless free time I'll just come back and add more later.