Artwork Guidelines

Artwork Quality for Glass Gobos

Our gobos can only be as good as your artwork. We make our glass gobos in ultra high optical resolution. However, the quality of the gobo is limited by the quality of your artwork. Please help us achieving the best results by providing us clean, crisp images by following our artwork guidelines.

Artwork Quality for Metal Gobos

While we prefer professional vector artwork, we can work from pretty much any artwork you provide as metal gobo designs don't require high resolution art.

If it looks good on your screen, it's probably ok for us.

Ideally we'd like to get your art in one of the professional formats described below but we are quite flexible. Try this: zoom your artwork so it fills about half the screen. If it looks clean, then it should be ok for gobo production.

Poor Artwork

We do smaller adjustments and redraws at no charge. For larger jobs, we charge a small fee and will quote this before producing the gobo.

Artwork Dimensions

The artwork does not need to be sized to the gobo dimensions. We automatically adjust it to the correct gobo image diameter suitable for the fixture. Let us know if you have special requirements.

Color Reference

We usually match the colors of your artwork with the colors of our Standard Color Palette. If you require us to match your colors exactly, please state this in the order sheet. This may incur additional costs. We are able to match virtually any color, but we cannot guarantee the exact match of your colors in the resulting projection due to variations in the fixtures and projection surface. Please let us know if you have special requirements.

How to Submit your Gobo Artwork

Automatically per file upload when you place your order online.
You can email your files to artwork@gobosource.com (max. size 15MB).
We can email you an upload link for extremely large files.

Electronic Format

Artwork is automatically transferred to our servers when the order is placed at our website. Or you can email us with the file attached to artwork@gobosource.com. Further details below.

Vector Format

For line art designs or typical illustrations, we require vector format. Please convert text to outlines or vector art. This prevents possible problems with font substitutions and interpretations. The file format should preferably be:

.ai (Adobe Illustrator)
.pdf (Portable Document Format)
.svg (Scalable Vector Graphics)
.eps (Encapsulated Postscript)
.wmf (Windows Meta File)

If you can only provide bitmap format, such as .jpg or .gif for our line art gobos, we may need to rework your artwork at an additional charge of $49.00. Please save the design in the highest possible quality (lowest compression).

Bitmap Format

For halftone, raster, gradients or photographic oriented designs, we require a high-resoultion bitmap file. The file format should preferably be:

.bmp (Bitmap)
.tiff (Tagged Image File Format)
.png (Portable Network Graphic)
.eps (Encapsulated Postscript)
.psd (Photoshop Document)
.jpg [*Export with highest quality preset/minimum compression*]

For professional art, please provide a minimum resolution of 600 dpi and a size of minimum 4 x 4" but not larger than 8 1/2 x 11".

Winword

Good quality images embedded in a .doc or .docx file can be faithfully reproduced. However, text provided in a doc file may look different on our screen than on yours because we may not have the same font installed. The resulting gobo would turn out wrong. Please rather convert your doc file to a more reliable format such as PNG.

DPI Guidelines

Keystoning

Projected images will experience distortion if the projection surface is not exactly perpendicular with the projector optics. Generally, this has a negligible effect on projected artwork and signs.

In some extreme cases, however, the gobo artwork must be stretched in a process called "keystoning" to offset distortion due to an excessively large projection angle (typically greater than 45°).

If keystoning is required for your installation, a member of our sales team will reach out help walk you through the measurement process to ensure your artwork recieves proper adjustment. Each gobo projector we sell includes a measuring grid gobo to assist in the keystoning process. To keystone a stock gobo design, a custom colored glass gobo must be ordered.