Our Basic Newspaper Advertising Sales Course

Ad sales training to help you to start selling fast in your new territory
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© 2015 Robert McInnis Consulting

Ad Layout: Digital Artwork

Accepting a completed ad in digital form can be a very tricky business since the advertiser must create the ad in a compatible application, use the right fonts and image formats, and convert everything properly to PDF format.

You'll learn more in-depth information about accepting digital ads from your advertisers in the next chapter on rate cards, but here are some quick guidelines about accepting digital artwork.

You'll want your advertisers to give you their artwork is a way that can be read by your designers. They can be e-mailed or, if the files are too big, sent using Dropbox. Some publications still maintain an FTP (file transer protocol) site for these purposes. You can ask your manager more about these options.

Adobe Photoshop is widely used by production departments, which, among other things, will allow almost any image to be converted to the department's preferred format. Because of this, they'll probably accept digital images in TIFF, JPG, PSD (Photoshop), PICT, and Illustrator EPS formats.

Again, if your advertiser is providing you with a completed ad, the guidelines are much more strict, since often once a customer provides a finished ad, it's impossible to translate incompatible image formats into good ones.

Of course, this won't ensure your image reproduces well, but it's a good start for the production department, who may be able to tweak a less-than-perfect image's highlights, midtones, shadows, and even sharpenss to make it work.

More about this will be found in the next chapter.

Next: How art scales