Submitting Digital Art for Publication: Advice From an Art Director

If your book or journal article has scanned illustrations—whether photographs, charts, or drawings—your publisher is going to require that they meet a certain standard. Something writers don’t always realize is that art that works perfectly well as an e-mail attachment or an online posting may flunk the test for print publication.

Jill Shimabukuro, director of design and production at the University of Chicago Press, kindly agreed to answer some questions for Lingua Franca about the most common problems with submitted art.

Carol: Jill, thanks for being here. Tell me how things have changed since the days when most art was submitted in hard-copy form.

Jill: I remember when our greatest concern was with dents in photographs, and their torn edges, or scratches on slides. We would painstakingly log all of these imperfections so we wouldn’t get in trouble when the art program was ultimately returned to authors. With hard-copy art, you rarely have to worry about whether the art is usable.

Carol: Ah, yes—the good old days. And now? What most often makes a photo unusable in a printed book or journal article?

Jill: These days, nearly all of the art we receive for our books is in digital format (though just yesterday I had to log in a record-album cover, with the album still inside the sleeve!). Insufficient resolution is the most common issue with digital photographs; it’s the primary reason we’ll reject an image.

Carol: Is there a way authors can make sure their images are of high enough resolution in the first place?

Jill: We’d like digital images to be at least 300 pixels per inch (ppi) at the size of reproduction, with good tonal ranges, and, ideally, obtained from or prepared by a professional resource (stock photo agency; professional photographer; photo lab that offers scanning services). We prefer digital art to be submitted in the TIFF format, but will accept EPS and JPEG formats as well.

Carol: OK. Let’s say we have some good 300 ppi scans in TIFF or JPEG form. What’s the best way to send them so they survive the transmission?

Jill: File sizes can get very large, so it isn’t always practical to send images as e-mail attachments. Instead, I recommend that authors put the entire art program on a single CD or DVD. The file names should include the figure numbers that are referenced in the manuscript. We also ask authors to include labeled laser prints of each image. The digital images are checked against the laser prints, to make sure the art program is accurate and complete.

Carol: How about a nice list of dos or don’ts?

Jill: OK. To help set you in the right direction here are five mistakes to avoid.

• DO NOT assume that a file that looks good on a computer screen is acceptable for print reproduction.

• DO NOT submit digital images in a PowerPoint file, or embedded in a Word Document.

• DO NOT submit digital images in the following file formats: GIF, PNG, BMP, or PSD.

• DO NOT edit or resave JPEG files (longish story … read the University of Chicago Press guidelines for details).

• DO NOT enlarge substandard files.

Carol: I imagine that some materials will present more complications than others. Where can writers get more detailed information?

Jill: It’s true that in many cases it isn’t possible for an author to use professional resources for preparing their images, especially if their illustrative material comes from several different locations. So I’d recommend that authors obtain their publisher’s guidelines for resolution standards. At the University of Chicago Press, we offer a quick summary of our requirements on our Press Web site, including a discussion of resolution. These guidelines are written with the understanding that an author might decide to scan his or her own images rather than seek assistance.

And for those who want comprehensive guidelines for hard-copy art, and all categories of digital art, we offer detailed instructions. We wrote these guidelines specifically for University of Chicago Press authors, though the guidelines are general enough to apply to most art that is created for professionally printed publications.

Carol: Jill, thank you! I’m sure your quick tips will be especially helpful to writers who are overwhelmed by the more detailed versions.

Jill: At the very least, these guidelines may persuade an author to drop a substandard image, or to take the time to obtain a suitable version.

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Readers may send Carol questions about academic writing, editing, and publishing. Write to her at AskCarolSaller@gmail.com. (Please ask questions about Chicago style here.)