Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Gillespie Graphics Newsletter! We are proud to share this information with our customers, and we look forward to working with you in 2007.

In this issue:

• A highlight of the Kettle Foods Volkswagen Beetle Graphics Project
• Spotlight of Gillespie’s new digital presses
• Tips on preparing digital art

Project Spotlight of the Month: Kettle Foods

Kettle Foods showcases a style as deliciously unique as their chips with the graphics on this Volkswagen Beetle. Cheerful sunflowers and the image of potato chip bags adorn this distinctive car.

Kettle Foods displays their style and corporate philosophy with this car, which also works as a wonderful advertisement for their products. Kettle Foods maintains a fleet of beetles, and these custom graphics highlight their environmental focus with its "powered by biodiesel" decals. Kettle creates biodiesel from the sunflower oil used in their chip making process, and they like to say their fleet is fueled by “flower power”.

Car graphics such as this are an easy and cost-effective way to advertise. When the Transportation Advertising Council researched the impact of car wraps and graphics, they found vehicle advertising can create up to 70,000 impressions per day.

Click here to read the full Kettle Foods Case Study.

In the past five months we’ve added two different Vutek digital presses to our production facility. These additional presses have increased capacity and have even faster turn around time.

Our Vutek printers can print up to an impressive 120” inches wide. We use these printers for a variety of graphics, including colorful vehicle wraps. Between our traditional screen printing presses and our digital presses, we can produce solutions for virtually any type of project you need.

Tip of the Month: Digital Art

When providing digital art, keep this simple rule in mind: if the artwork is poor, the resulting print will also be poor quality as well. Which leads to the question: what can you do to create perfect graphics?

1. Make sure your files are saved in the proper formats at the right resolutions. If your image is going to cover the size of van or long-haul trailer, the file is going to be very large. A general guide is that the image to be at least 100 to 150 pixels per inch at 100% size. For a graphic that is going to be printed in a small size, 300 DPI is generally safe.

2. For photographs, be sure to use an RGB format. Also realize that there is a limit to what can be done with a 35mm photo and some digital photos. If the photo is blurry or out of focus, there’s a limit to how it can be cleaned up.

3. When you need a specific color, please provide a sample of the color, whether it’s a swatch, PMS color number, business card, etc. Monitors are highly variable, and what might look like the perfect shade of red on one computer might look different on another. We can color correct to shades that look right to us, but it might not be what you have in mind. But if we have a color sample, we can ensure your products will exactly match the intended colors.