Unchained at the sign printer: How we make our custom yard signs

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I think this might be less than useful, but it keeps coming up in my mail. I love it that people are trying to make custom yard signs for their listings, but it seems plausible that the best technical advice will come in the comments.

Why is that? Because I use professional pre-press tools that most people don’t have.

Our signs are made in QuarkXPress for the Macintosh at one-sixth scale. In other words, the big sign with the full-bleed photo is made at 25p6 x 37p6 — one pica scales to one inch. The reason for working at this scale is simply to keep the Quark files manageable.

When we’re dummying up a sign, I will often work with low-resolution versions of the photos, this to enable faster printing so we can see what the sign looks like.

For the finished version, I use Adobe PhotoShop to produce very high-resolution CMYK EPS photo files to be placed back in Quark, there to be scaled and positioned. It’s possible to do everything I’m talking about within PhotoShop, but Quark is much better for both positioning and typographic control.

We take our listing photos at 5 megapixels. The camera will do more than that, but since most of these photos are going to be down-sampled to 640 x 480 pixels, we make a trade-off between resolution and the number of available photos on the memory card.

For the smaller photos on our signs, I normally down-sample to 2400 x 1800 pixels at 300 pixels per inch. For the large photo, I normally up-sample to 16000 x 12000 pixels at 300 ppi. If you get very close to that big image on a sign, you’ll see some pixelization. This is not visible at normal distances.

Once everything is in place in Quark, I save the page as an EPS file. The raster images — the photos — will be encapsulated as is, with the positioning and scaling information conveyed in PostScript. The type, rules and logos are vector images, infinitely scalable.

I import the EPS file into PhotoShop, scaling it to 25.5″ x 37.5″ at 300 pixels per inch. This is a monstrously huge raster image, but from here I’m almost done: I save the file as a CMYK TIFF file, which is exactly what the sign printer eats as its native food. They love me at the sign print shop: My files require no pre-press work on their end.

The smaller signs are made by the same basic procedure, although that procedure is much easier without photos. Our custom directional signs use a hybrid of the procedure described here.

Everything then gets burned onto a CD-ROM. The sign printer we use doesn’t have robust FTP, and this quantity of data moves faster by sneakernet than it would by broadband anyway. I’m normally right around 700 megabytes for a full set of signs.

As I said, I don’t think this is all that useful. If you can already work this way, you don’t need me to teach you how. Most people will want some degree of participation from the sign vendor.

The most important piece of this puzzle, therefore, is the resolution of your photos. On TV, photos improve in quality when you enlarge them. On earth, where every real thing comes in finite quantity, spreading fewer pixels across a larger space will result in a progressive loss of image quality. A photograph that is going to print well should be over-sampled for the device it’s printing on.

Now: If other people who are making custom yard signs will tell us how they are working, we’ll know something worth talking about.

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