The whole of your design can't be fit onto the card without leaving a border on at least two edges, so instead, a slight crop will be added to remove the parts of your image that don’t fit. OK, now this is a little bit more complicated. But your safest bet is to simply follow the 3:2 golden rule. Now, this is not an exact science, which means an image that is “close enough” to a 3:2 ratio may fill the entire card. Because these images are the same shape as the card itself there's no need to modify them at all to print right up to the edges. There are three basic scenarios depending on the shape of your uploaded images: I shoot at 3:2, or crop to 3:2 before uploadingĬommon practice! And that's the simplest situation to deal with. How does this affect me as a card designer?Ĭards are printed by 3rd-party printers at either 4×6 inches or 5×7.5 inches, which by now should be leaping out as an aspect ratio of 3:2 (or 2:3 if you’re designing a portrait card it’s the same rectangle).
No chance! If you’re interested in the history and intricacies of this nonsense then the Wikipedia article is a good place to start. Incidentally, 3888 multiplied by 2592 is just about 10 million which is where the whole 10-megapixel business comes from but that’s a story for another day. 3888/2592 = 1.5, so all of its images will be a 3:2 ratio when they come off the camera. For example, a 10 megapixel Canon 40d shoots at 3888×2592. Check the resolution of one of your photos and divide the width by the height. If you’re not sure what format your camera produces there’s an easy way to find out. The two most common camera formats these days are 3:2 (Canon and Nikon digital SLRs and 35mm film) and 4:3 (most compact digital cameras). No one likes saying twenty-six-thousand-and-sixty by two-thousand so we’ll use what little maths we can remember from high school to simplify that fraction to “4:3”. Your digital camera might take photos at 2660×2000 pixels. We'll use cameras as an example from now on because it’s what comes naturally, but exactly the same principle applies to flatbed scanners, vector graphics software, fractal generators, or any of the other myriad ways of producing a file on your desktop that ends in.
We could make those same rectangles using more boxes (let’s call those boxes pixels from now on). By that same logic, we’d call two boxes side by side forming a long, thin rectangle “2:1”. A square box’s sides will always be the same length as each other – we’d say that it was “1:1”. An aspect ratio of three to t-Īspect ratio is a mathematical way of describing how rectangular a rectangle is in terms of its width and height. That depends on the aspect ratio of your images. Your artist information will be placed on the backside of each style card. Character Limitsįor P ostcards, there is a 35-character limit, as opposed to the G reeting Cards, which have a 40 character limit. So here's some helpful advice from a fellow independent artist on the Redbubble marketplace, Rick Grundy. A few independent artists have asked questions about how their artwork is fit onto Greeting Cards and how they will look when they’re printed.