BIC Artwork Requirements

All orders requiring production art should include black and white line artwork. We recommend camera-ready and digitally produced art for the cleanest, sharpest imprint. Your graphic designer or advertising agency can supply this. At no additional charge, BIC can set copy and do light touch-ups. BIC reserves the right to delay or reject any order based on artwork received.

Camera-Ready Art used to be "shot" with a camera onto photographic paper to make a stat or PMT. Now, it is usually a laser print with a resolution of 600 dpi or more. It should be black & white line art with no halftones or screens. Multi-color imprints need color separations for each color with registration marks and a color composite.

You can also try letterhead, business cards and printed pieces on flat, smooth surfaces. Please note that these usually need to be touched up to work well, which can cause delays.

NOT USABLE AS ART: faxes, copies of faxes, and products with curved surfaces.

Digital Art - also called electronic art, can be sent on a 3.5" disk, zip disk, CD-ROM and by e-mail. For the best results, create your art as vector art in Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw, save as an EPS (encapsulated postscript file), and convert your fonts to curves in CorelDraw and outlines in Adobe Illustrator.

Include all files that have been placed, embedded, nested or imported into your art. Always send a hard copy of your artwork along with your purchase order by fax or mail.

STAY AWAY FROM scans of faxes, Quark files with Mac-based fonts, Microsoft multi-color files and any file with a resolution of 300 dpi or less. For compression, we recommend Stuffit.

Artwork Standards
In order to give you the highest quality imprint, we have developed some artwork guidelines, which include minimum line weights. All copy should be 6 points or larger. Lines should be no thinner than .5 pt. We will redraw halftones and screens, filling them in or outlining them, and reset copy when necessary. BIC reserves the right to modify your art if it does not meet these quality standards.

Proofs
Proofs for BIC® and Sheaffer® writing instruments and Eveready® products are provided upon request and include free overnight delivery or fax. A no-charge fax proof will be provided for each Sheaffer diary order.

Charges for proofs are as follows:
Layout proof (faxed): $7.00 per color, allow 3 additional working days for proof.