Hello i’m the Designer for FRC Team 4255 and I need some help. I’m working on a banner design for our pits. I finished the General design but, I need to know how I should size the banner. I would prefer the dimension in pixels.
Who will be printing the banner for you? Contact them and see what their standard sizes are. They will most likely provide with inches as measurements, but you can easily convert to pixels using Google or Photoshop/Illustrator/Corel/any other graphics program.
The two questions that feed into this are:
What is the physical size of the banner going to be? Certainly no larger than 10 feet square, because that would take up a full side of your pit. You should probably trim this a bit, because I understand some venues don’t have the space to give you a full 10’x10’ pit. If it will be in front of the pit, over the “door”, you should limit it to about 3’ tall so that it can be under the 10’ height limit and allow tall people (and your perhaps 78" tall robot on a 6" high cart) to enter and leave easily. Figure your answer in inches.
The other question is what resolution (dots per inch) do you need? If you think people are going to walk up to the banner and read it at normal book distance, you’ll need about 2000 dpi for photo quality, or 600dpi for a good (not photo) quality. If you’re posting it on the back wall and no one will be looking at it from less than ten feet away, you can probably get away with 200dpi or even 100dpi. To answer this question, try creating a small patch (8"x10" or less) of what is likely to be the most critical piece of your banner, and print it at various resolutions, then look at it from your “nearest” distance.
Then, multiply your dpi number by the number of inches in your banner. For example, if you’re doing a 3’ x 8’ banner (that’s 36" x 96") that’ll be on the back wall of your pit so you go with 200dpi, your image will need to be 7200 pixels by 19200 pixels - 138 megapixels!
However, if your design consists of large areas of constant color, you can do much better by creating a vector graphics file of some sort and sending it to the limner (sign maker) to execute. Find out what formats they can use before you start! Almost anyone can use a PDF or postscript file, and who knows, some of them may even be able to take your CAD output, or something you can export from CAD.
If you make your document 2000dpi most large format printers (like a school would have) won’t be able to print that, my classroom labs large format printer can print up to 1000dpi, but a file of that resolution will be a huge drain on storage space. The last banner I printed was for the rookie team that we mentored last year and it was 2’x6’ @ 200dpi. It took around five minutes to print, but almost twenty for the printer to prepare the document because it was almost a half gigabyte in size. I just did a quick test to see, and a 9’x3’ document at 600dpi would be 5.2 GB!
For a banner you will never need to be right next to it to read it. I print ours at 150-200dpi. A safe comparison is billboards, our local company gave a presentation in my class and the typical resolution they print at is between 18-40dpi because the subject is at a minimum of 100’ away from the image. The further away your audience is the lower your quality can be.
For any kind of sign making, vector artwork is your friend. Your logo should be vector because you can scale it to any size without losing quality.
I never thought to ask, but why do you want to measure in pixels anyway?
I want to measure in pixels since i’m using mainly photoshop to make the design and the dimensions for resizing only show in pixels. I mainly made the Logo I used on the banner in illustrator. I’m also very amateur when it comes to graphic design can you please give a simpler explanation? Also do you think I should remake the Banner on Adobe Illustrator for a better result? Sorry if I miss any thing that is common sense haha.
Essentially, Illustrator produces an image using mathematical calculations to make it to where it is infinitely scalable. A vector graphic is just as happy on a 100’ by 100’ banner as it is on a 3" by 5" notecard. Photoshop, on the other hand, produces an image by dividing it up into pixels. Small images don’t upscale well, but vector graphics do. In short, I definitely recommend that you use Illustrator to make your banner. Doing so makes your pixel count question irrelevant, anyway. 
Illustrator would be the better option as it is a vector (lines and fills) program. Photoshop would work just as well, but since it is raster (dots and pixels) it will be more dependent on the quality or resolution you set when you create your file. However, Illustrator won’t necessarily give you a better result. Illustrator will simply create a crisp edge no matter the size you enlarge to. This is because there is no such thing as pixelation in a vector image. Photoshop has some really cool effects and tools that you can’t do in Illustrator though. For an easy answer, I rarely design anything in one or the other because I always use both and jump back and forth. If you use File -> Place to move parts from one program to another, they remain in their native formats (vector or raster).
In Photoshop you can simply type in “4 in” and it will resize to 4 inches, just as you can type in “4 mm” and it will resize to 4 millimeters. Also you can change your units like this.
What he said…
Thank you guess i’m going to spend all night improving and designing on illustrator. At least I got 4 weeks
But the big upside? Once you have it nailed in Illustrator, it will mean a lot of other things your team needs will be more or less set.
I designed 4901’s logo (we call it the radar icon). For most of our key applications (the Garnet Squadron name, the radar icon, our number–and then repeat for our two FLL teams’ names and numbers), we just have two versions that work 99% of the time: one with a black border for placement on white backgrounds, and one with a white border that goes on black or our digital camouflage pattern. T-shirt? Pit banner? Hoodie? Identification stickers for FLL boxes? Done, done, done, done.
(That’s not to say we don’t fiddle with it on occasion…)](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BlYHYkJCAAEhtkd.jpg)
Needs a vector EJ…
Can’t agree enough. The number of times i hear “Hey schreiber can you give me a logo and XYZ” and am able to turn around the graphic they need in a couple minutes regardless of size is just so nice.