Hands down, the biggest challenge in creating a custom laser engraved title plate lies in the artwork. Logo artwork needs to be camera ready, that means clear, crisp black and white art. Admittedly, I cringe when someone sends me art to review for their fantasy football trophy, I know when I open the file what I am going to see. Less than 1 percent of artwork submitted for engraving is acceptable, and I spend a great deal of time explaining to fantasy commishes why.
I am going to use actual examples of fantasy football trophy artwork submitted to illustrate this point. Let's start with exhibit A. This is typical of the kind of art file we receive. Most leagues create their logos in a jpeg format and have it posted up on their fantasy league website. While this is great for a website, it's no good for laser engraving. First of all, it is in color, and a laser only operates in black and white. There are a few exceptions in terms of greyscale that I will address in part 4 of this article.The biggest problem with this logo, which is so common, is that when you attempt to enlarge it, the logo becomes pixilated, with jagged edges. With a laser engraved title plate, what you see is what you get, so having a pixilated and blurry image on the plate looks like, how shall I say it? Crap.
In the case of this fantasy league logo, we needed to completely recreate the artwork in a high resolution format. This means our graphics department had to draw the logo in CorelDraw which then can be used to engrave the plate. When a fantasy football logo has to be sent to the art department, we generate a proof for client review in a jpeg or pdf file for easy viewing.
In the second example above, we have inverted the file and changed the white to a gold color. This is very helpful for football leagues to imagine how their logo will look laser engraved on the trophy. At this point we can make changes to the logo to help clarify certain elements, based on what the league commissioner wants. Once approval is given on the art, we can complete the title plate on the fantasy football trophy!
Here we have the completed trophy, which you can click on to get a better look, along with any of the other pictures in this post. This fantasy football trophy also incorporates custom fonts, and again, prior to engraving, the entire layout was sent in a proof to the commish for approval.If your logo needs to be recreated, you will have to pay a one time art charge, which is typically $30, but can be higher if the logo is super detailed and takes more time to draw and digitize.
Trust your trophy engraver if they tell you the artwork is not suitable. Look at the logo, try to enlarge it to a 4 inch by 4 inch size, and if looks pixilated, it's no good. Don't try to smooth it or sharpen contrast in your photo editing program and resubmit it again and again. Many fantasy leagues do this in an effort to avoid the art charge, and spend hours monkeying around with the logo. If you want the logo to look like it should on your football trophy, and you don't have a graphics artist in your league, just bite the bullet and have it done right. Our policy is, if the artwork won't look great on the plate, we simply don't accept it, because we know that ultimately the league will be disappointed with the results.
To see our full collection of fantasy football perpetual, loser and keeper trophies, visit us at Sculpture Alley! Please feel free to email or post any questions!
No comments:
Post a Comment