What Is DPI?

You've put time and energy into designing the perfect business card. Colors and fonts have been chosen, now to find that perfect background image. You just go to Google images and pick out one you like, finish your card and send it off to your favorite print shop, only to receive a call telling you that your beloved business card cannot be printed. What gives?

The problem is this: Images on the web are usually 72dpi, and the minimum for print is 300dpi.

"What the flying sam hill is dpi", you ask? DPI stands for Dots Per Inch (in this case, the dots are pixels). Most images found on the internet are made up of 72 dots per inch, which will display well on your computer monitor but when printed look very blurry. The minimum amount of dots per inch for any printed image is 300, so if you try to print something from the web professionally you're suddenly 228 dots short!

How can you get around this problem? There are a couple options. One is to purchase high resolution, royalty-free photos from a site like shutterstock.com. At a site like that you can browse hundreds of images that are classified by keywords.

Another option is to do an image search on Google, but search for images over 10mb. Be warned though, many images will be owned by others so it is imperative that you check the copyright status of the image you want to use before printing it.