Have you ever noticed how when you share a story with someone, it becomes their story too?

There is something validating when we can say, “Oh yeah, that happened to…” me, my friend, my brother, my dog, whomever… It’s a concrete way of showing that we can relate to what the other person is saying. And it can be really exciting to be the first person to share a story within your circle.

This idea was highlighted for me tonight. My wallet was stolen this afternoon. That’s a pretty simple statement, but the narrative of the events unfolding and the aftermath of it all is quite complicated. The story isn’t even complete yet. I have shared it with my immediate family, and then (somewhat without thinking) I posted it on Facebook.

As I lay awake in bed, unable to sleep, I realized that I am already tired of the story and regretted the Facebook post. I don’t know that I want to keep hashing it out with every person I know, because it’s tiring to keep reliving the experience. But, I know that the story will spread throughout my network, even though I don’t know that I necessarily want it to.

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Katie Olson and Scared Panda, commissioned me to create a t-shirt titled “Chaotic Peace.” Here’s how Katie described her inspiration for the shirt:

Sometimes the craziness of the city can be overwhelming. How do you stay peaceful when everything around you seems to be moving at warp speed? One of my biggest challenges is quieting my mind and living in peace AMONGST the chaos. I’ve learned to not only live with, but appreciate the chaos and still maintain a calmness through my yoga practice.

We used the Milwaukee/Damen/North intersection in Wicker Park as the setting for this illustration. I sourced the inspiration images from Google Maps and Shutterstock.

Take a look at how the project unfolded:
(Click to enlarge the images)

Below: First draft for the client, compiled of four individual drawings

Below: Second draft – The client requested a new drawing of figure and adding people walking on the sidewalks in the background.

Below: Third draft – We tried another new foreground figure and added cyclists to make the scene even more “chaotic” (Shown on gray to emulate ink selections)

Fourth draft – Another new “hybrid” version of the main figure, and we changed the cyclists to line drawings instead of silhouettes.

The final t-shirt!

I am really impressed with the printing done by the folks at Replica Chicago. This was a really detailed drawing. I have some experience with screenprinting, and I know how hard it is to get those fine lines to show up. The detail is incredible in this print. I was ecstatic with the results.

Also, 10% of all the sales of this shirt will go to Imerman Angels.

Nearly everyone has been touched by cancer somehow and organizations like Imerman Angels make a world of difference for caregivers and patients. Imerman Angels carefully matches and individually pairs a person touched by cancer with someone who has fought and survived the same type of cancer.

Pretty awesome, right? If you dig the shirt and want one of your very own, check out Scared Panda.

Almost every time I receive a picture from a client, they ask, “Is this image big enough?” If it isn’t, the jargon begins to fly: resolution (or “res”), pixels, pixelated, screen resolution, print resolution, DPI, PPI … whew! Clients are often confused because the image looks fine on their computer and they can’t understand why it won’t look great when it is printed for the final piece.

Let me try to explain some of the technical jargon, as simply as possible, as it is related to the field of graphic design.

Resolution

Image resolution describes the amount of detail an image holds. Higher resolution images are crisper and more detailed. In a lower resolution image, the fine differences in color disappear, edges become blurred, etc. There are many kinds of resolution that can apply to film, television, etc., but the two types we are concerned with here are print resolution and screen resolution.

Screen Resolution

In general, resolution is measured in ___ per ___, with those blanks depending on the medium. Screen resolution is measured in pixels per inch (PPI). There’s another piece of jargon – a pixel is a tiny square of color. A monitor uses tiny pixels to assemble text and images on screen.

The optimal resolution for images on screen is 72 DPI. Increasing the DPI won’t make the image look any better, it’ll just make the file larger, which will probably slow down the website when it loads or the file when it opens.

Print Resolution

Print resolution is measured in dots per inch (or “DPI”), which means the number of dots of ink per square inch that a printer deposits on a piece of paper. So, 300 DPI means that a printer will output 300 tiny dots of ink to fill every square inch of the print. 300 DPI is the standard print resolution for high resolution output.

How the two work together

Documents begin on screen and either stay on screen, or they are printed. If the document will stay on the screen (like a website), you just need to worry about screen resolution, so your images should be 72 PPI.

An important note: Sometimes the terms DPI (print) and PPI (screen) are used interchangeably. So, don’t be confused if someone refers to a 300 DPI image that is on screen, because pixels per inch (PPI) translate equally to dots per inch (DPI).

If you’re going to print the document, you need to make sure the images are 300 DPI at 100% of the final output size. This sounds more complicated than it really is.

We already know that 300 DPI images have 300 dots per square inch. So, if we have an image that is 300 pixels by 300 pixels — we can print it at 1″ × 1″ at 300 DPI. If this is the final output size, we are good to go. If the image was intended to be printed as a 2″ × 2″ image, we would be in trouble, because it would output at only 150 DPI. If this was intended to be a 5″ × 5″ image, we are in trouble, because the image would output at only 60 DPI.

The bigger we try to print the 300px × 300px image (note: px is the abbreviation for pixel), the more pixellated it becomes. Pixellated is a term used to indicate the degradation of the image – the eye can start to see the individual pixels, and the edges become very jagged.

Here is how a 300px × 300 px image, printed at 1″ × 1″ at 300 DPI:

Here is how the same 300px × 300 px image, printed at 2″ × 2″ at 150 DPI would look (I had to crop in on it for the purposes of the post, but you can start to see the pixellation:

Here is how the same 300px × 300 px image, printed at 5″ × 5″ at 60 DPI would look (I had to crop in on it for the purposes of the post, but you can  really start to see the pixellation:

As I hope you can see, the original image size doesn’t matter as much as what the DPI will be when the image is printed out at 100%. The image is perfectly fine at 1 inch by 1 inch, but it looks terrible at 5 inches by 5 inches because the DPI is only 60.

How can I figure out the DPI of an image?

Math. And unfortunately, it has little do with the overall file size of an image (like whether the image is 1MB or 10MB).  In general, a bigger file size is better to give your designer, but there’s a more exact method to it. We need to find the overall dimensions of the image, and then do some math.

On a Mac

• Right-click (or control-click) on an image.
• Select “Get Info.”
• Under the “More info” tab, look for Dimensions.

You should see a number like “1024 x 768″ (some number x some number). These numbers show the number of pixels in the image (width x height)

On a PC

• Right-click on image icon.
• Select “Properties.”
• Click the “Summary” tab in the properties window.

You’ll see values for the Width, Height, Horizontal Resolution and Vertical Resolution.
(You can see screen shots here). Ignore the Horizontal and Vertical Resolution values. Just pay attention to the overall Width and Height

So, if you want to print an image that is 1024 × 768 (listed as Width=1024px, Height=768px on a PC), you need to divide each value by 300 to see how many inches you can print at 300 dpi.

1024 ÷ 300 = 3.4133″ (width)

768 ÷ 300 = 2.56″ (height)

So, you could print this 1024px × 768px image at 300 DPI at a size of 3.4133″ × 2.56″ – any bigger than this, and you risk the image becoming pixellated. Sure, you can enlarge the image a teeny, tiny bit beyond this size, if you need to, but it’s best if you don’t.

That’s it!

Designers, did I forget anything? Non-designers, does this make sense to you? Is there anything that is still confusing you?