With 30+ years of experience, Otto has seen just about every type of art, source, and technique there is. You don't need to have a degree in design art to deal with us. Part of our service philosophy is that we can take a quick sketch and turn it into something you would be proud to wear. Something WE would be proud to wear. But it doesn't have to be that way. Your job can be planned from the start to be done the right way.
The very best designers in the world cannot know what we do about working with the materials and processes specific to pass production. While we can brief them, they still do not have the processes irradiated into their bones the way we do. In fact, the best designers in the world prefer to send us the design elements and instructions on styles and usages and let us make the mechanicals precisely because they do understand that we can do a better job more easily.
If, however, there are circumstances that make it necessary for you to have the work done in-house, we provide templates for the reference of your artists. They are available for download at the links below.
If a particular look is important, (and why wouldn't it be?), Otto can handle that very well. You might have noticed from our samples, or passes you have seen over the years, that there is no particular "Otto look." This is quite deliberate. We are not the subject, the artist is, and we are quite adept at being chameleons. What we do excel at is making anyone's design look like it was done in a professional manner with all due concern for the quality of the results.
Things you want to keep in mind when talking with people providing you art.
If someone says to you that they have a Mac file, be very wary. Files are generated in specific programs, most of which run on both Macs and PCs. The most common are Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDRAW!, PageMaker, and QuarkXPress. Most of these programs can trade files among themselves. These formats are called TIFF (pronounced "tiff"), and EPS (pronounced "ee pea ess"). Otto can deal with files from any of these formats or programs, (as well as others, but why confuse the issue?).
This is not to put down the Web. The Web has been a boon to our generation. But the sad fact is that a Web graphic is not capable of the precision necessary for good quality printing. It's a matter of not having enough stuff to provide a crisp, clear image in print.
Just as is the case in sound reproduction, each generation of duplication of an image introduces a little more distortion than the last. Color, sharpness, contrast, and dynamic range, (yes, there is dynamic range in the visual arts, too), all suffer when copies are made. If our source art is a photograph, send a print or slide made directly from the original. If our source is a painting, send a photo made directly from the original. If our source is a digital file, send it in the original, uncompressed format in which it was created. (The neat thing about digital files is that, so long as they are not converted or compressed, there is no loss in quality.)
While we can reproduce artwork from CD covers and the like, the quality suffers greatly and, in order to get something even somewhat reasonable, we must go through difficult, time-consuming, and expensive processes. The savings in grief and money are well worth the small effort expended in getting shooting chromes and logo stats or original digital files from the record company or other creator.
Your designer will necessarily charge you for design work, (whereas his merely supplying the design elements will cost you less), design work that we will quite likely not be able to use without modification. So long as you do not attempt to rip the designer off, by all means pay him for the time it takes him to gather up the elements and send them to us -- he should have no objection to sending the material to us for use on your passes. A really good designer will likely be glad to be relieved of the drudgery of purely mechanical layout.
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