You'd love me, signal. I would ask you what size and format you wanted it, and whether you had ftp so I could upload it for you.

Not joking, I got a .bmp file once. SIGH.

I gave up after a while and would request it from them in the off chance they cared about their image, and when sent complete crap, would just go grab it off their website.

Of course, I wasn't doing print which needs more resolution, I was doing websites, but still!

Sending sympathies your way, signal.

signal, I feel your pain.

Something that mostly works for me: I never talk to the marketing guys, I always try to talk to the IT guys. I just tell 'em I need a .tiff file or whatever resolution and they're like sure, fine, whatever and I get exactly what I want.

Sometimes it isn't that easy but it's best to avoid talking to admin. staff or the publicity/marketing staff if you can help it. As an admin person myself, I can safely say that a good half to 75% of the AAs in any given organisation have little to no understanding of desktop publishing requirements. And you can usually entirely forget about their bosspersons.

Could you please use this image to print our Nike logo on t-shirts? We'd like the logo to span the whole front of the shirt. kthxbi

≡ Click to see image ≡

I needed the logo a bit bigger, so I figured instead of bother you again, I'd just recreate it.
≡ Click to see image ≡

I've had to re-build enough logos to wonder if that should be a main service. People suck. Also, they don't realize that my job is actually work. I should drink more.

I have read this issue countless times. Terms of client-supplied art should be part of the contract.

Terms of client-supplied art should be part of the contract

They usually are. The problem is that clients are.. well... clients. They don't give a fuck about "your problems."

I got sent an ADVERTISEMENT for a printed directory, in a word document. A WORD DOCUMENT.

I've just spent the morning turning it into awesomeness in the correct format.

People suck.

As an outsider to design etiquette (but hopefully not a suit-drone), what's so bad about a .bmp? Are they usually not lossless?

A BMP isn't nearly as bad as a crappy image embedded in a Word document. Ugh, ugh, ugh. I'm not even a professional designer yet I can't count how many times I have received this.

Ugh, story of my frickin' life. I can't tell you how many times people have sent in web graphics...embedded in a Word doc...to be printed, like, 3 ft. by 4 ft. or something.

You want to have some real fun? Try explaining to some parent or secretary the difference between a vector .eps and a raster .eps. Silence on the other end of the phone every time.

Huh. Either I'm not as anal-neurotic as I thought (at least regarding this), or we all need to get out more.
Work would be great if it wasn't for clients.

And on the other hand: While this is an inherently annoying part of being the "desktop publishing whiz" at a vast majority of companies, here's the thing.

When I import said crapulous low-rez .jpg file into CS and spend twenty minutes restoring/translating it into awesomeness before the eyes of the marketing dept., it makes me look like some kind of god, and they shower me with gift cards and win. When in reality, I'm doing something any random first-year graphic arts drone could. And I don't cost my boss $150/hour to do it. And we don't piss off the "talented" graphics help or waste a resource in IT by asking them to do shit work.

*shrug*