Designing your jobs for trade sign making
There are some key areas where your design work can either help or hinder or trade sign making service.
On the rest of this page, we have laid out some simple processes which will help you design for trade sign making.
We try and make it as simple as we can for you to get your design files to us. Whatever the sign making software you currently use you should be able to generate and email the correct type of files quite easily.
You don’t have to work out prices for yourself we will happily take your information and tailor a quote for you in the fastest possible time.
Typefaces the best ones for trade sign making
The best typefaces to use for your designs are the high-quality ones which came with your design software or those for sale from reputable font outlets.
If you want to incorporate typefaces you have downloaded from free online font sites please be careful. Most free fonts are not very high quality and usually have errors in them. On computer screens and printed material, these issues might not matter too much. For our production systems, poor quality typefaces and any inherent errors cause problems.
Our CNC machinery reads typeface data exactly as it sees it errors and all. If your typeface, on close examination shows jagged edges or spikes these will be recreated by our machinery. If our output matches your supplied artwork the cost of making replacement lettering with fall to you.
If you want specific typefaces please convert them to curves before sending artwork to us alternatively send a copy of the. TTF or other font character set with your artwork.
Designing for trade sign making artwork size
If at all possible we would like you to design at full scale (1:1 ratio). This eliminates the chance of sizing errors.
If you use an illustration package like CorelDraw then full-size design is simple and easy to set up.
If you have no choice but to work at scale please make a clear note on your artwork file and the accompanying email explaining what the ratio you have used is.
Vector files are by nature quite small and compact so you don’t have to worry about emailing full-sized artwork.
Fitting parts onto sheets
If you want a number of letters or parts cut from any of the materials we process you do not have to try and fit your components onto sheet sized layouts.
We appreciate that you might want to get the best price by squeezing as many parts onto a given sheet size as possible. The reason we ask you not to bother part arranging for yourself is that we do this for you anyway.
We use sophisticated part nesting/ sheet optimising software to get your parts out of the smallest amount of material possible. Our software is much more miserly than a human and can stuff more parts onto a given sheet than we can manually.
Using the right design format
CNC machinery uses a similar design file type to that used with sign making plotters and cutters:
- Minimum line thickness (hairline)
- No fill patterns or colours
- All parts need to fit within the on-screen page area
- All typefaces must be converted to curves or copies of actual font files must be sent along with your designs.
All designs can be emailed to us
We have uprated email handling facilities which allow you to send virtually any file direct by email.
If you prefer to fax over a sketch or layout sheet we will happily work from this kind of specification.
Designs for trade sign making, simple guides to make production easier.