On this page 6 sections
1:10 scale artwork means building your banner design at one tenth of its real size, with exactly the same proportions. Order a 10 ft × 3 ft (3048 × 914 mm) banner and your page is 304.8 × 91.4 mm. Every measurement shrinks along with it, so the 50 mm edge margin turns into 5 mm. The one thing that refuses to shrink is how many pixels a photo needs, and that’s where most people come unstuck. Here’s how to get it right.
When working small makes sense #
Ask a design program for a page three metres wide and you’ll often hit trouble. Some refuse outright. Plenty crawl once big photos go in. And the finished file can be a pain to send. Drop everything to a tenth and the page becomes something any laptop copes with, while every measurement stays precise.
We’re happy to take banner files at full size or drawn to an exact scale, as our artwork guidelines say, provided the shape matches what you’ve ordered. The word that matters is exact. A page that’s roughly the right shape has to be squashed or trimmed to fit, and a picture that looks lovely at postcard size might be far too small for three metres of PVC.
Setting the page size for 1:10 scale artwork #
Take the real size in millimetres and divide both numbers by ten. Always begin with the precise figure, never a rounded one. UK law pins the foot at exactly 304.8 mm (see Schedule 1 to the Weights and Measures Act 1985), so 8 ft is 2438 mm, not 2400.
| Page you draw | What it prints as | Photo pixels to fill it, 150 dpi at real size |
|---|---|---|
| 243.8 × 91.4 mm | 8 ft × 3 ft banner, 2438 × 914 mm | 14400 × 5400 |
| 243.8 × 121.9 mm | 8 ft × 4 ft banner, 2438 × 1219 mm | 14400 × 7200 |
| 304.8 × 91.4 mm | 10 ft × 3 ft banner, 3048 × 914 mm | 18000 × 5400 |
| 300 × 200 mm | 3 m × 2 m banner, 3000 × 2000 mm | 17717 × 11811 |
| 400 × 100 mm | 4 m × 1 m banner, 4000 × 1000 mm | 23622 × 5906 |
That’s the upper end of the 100 to 150 dpi range big banners need. For the lower end, divide the pixel counts by 1.5.
The pixel trap #
Shrinking the page doesn’t shrink what a photo needs. A photo stretched across that 10 ft × 3 ft banner wants about 12000 × 3600 pixels to hit 100 dpi on the finished PVC, whether it sits on a 3048 mm page or a 304.8 mm one. The only thing that changes is the dpi figure your software displays:
- On a full-size page, you’re looking for 100 to 150 dpi.
- On the tenth-size page, the very same picture shows 1000 to 1500 dpi. That’s correct, not wasteful.
- See 150 dpi reported on a tenth-size page? On the banner that’s a miserable 15 dpi, which looks like a mosaic whichever side of the road you stand.
Keep logos and lettering as vectors; they have no resolution ceiling. How to find a photo’s pixel dimensions is covered in our guide to image resolution for print.
Margins, text and lines, divided by ten #
Every full-size rule just loses a zero:
- Edge margin: the 50 mm kept clear on the real banner for hems and eyelets is 5 mm on your page.
- Headline for readers 15 m away: capitals of 125 mm become 12.5 mm, roughly 50 pt.
- Smaller detail: 40 mm capitals become 4 mm, near enough 16 pt.
- Borders and rules: a line 5 mm thick becomes 0.5 mm.
Treat the point sizes as a guide. In most typefaces a capital stands about 70% of the point size, so multiplying the capital height in millimetres by four gets you close. Reading distances are covered in sign text size, and margins for every product in print bleed.
Ten checks for 1:10 scale artwork #
Before you start, have the exact size you’re ordering in millimetres, a vector logo, photos at full resolution and software that saves PDFs.
- Get the real size in millimetres. Take it from the product page. For custom size banners, use the precise numbers you’ll be typing in.
- Divide by ten and keep the decimals. 304.8 × 91.4 mm, not 305 × 91.
- Draw a 5 mm guide round every edge. It stands for the 50 mm safe margin on the real thing. Keep everything important inside.
- Take the background to all four edges. Cover the page completely so no white shows by the hems.
- Judge each photo against the real banner. Compare its pixels with the table, not the page. A picture covering half the width needs roughly half the pixels listed.
- Size lettering for the real distance. Work out the full-size capital height, divide it by ten and set your type to that.
- Save a high-quality PDF. Embed or outline the fonts. Turn off image downsampling, which small-file presets often switch on, or it’ll strip out the very pixels you’ve carefully kept.
- Check the shape matches. Divide page width by page height and do the same for the real size: 304.8 ÷ 91.4 and 3048 ÷ 914 both come to about 3.33. Match.
- Put the scale in the file name. For example “banner-3048×914-scale-1-10.pdf”, so it can’t be taken for a tiny print.
- Upload on the product page. Someone checks it at full size, covering dimensions, resolution and edges, before it goes to print. Export settings for popular programs are in our guide to a PDF for printing.
Or skip the maths with the online designer #
Our online designer works in true millimetres, so nothing needs scaling at all. It shows where the eyelets go and where the safe area ends, flags soft pictures and undersized text, and handles large jobs such as large mesh banners up to 16 ft 5 in × 9 ft 10 in (5000 × 3000 mm). It costs nothing to design and preview, and your print PDF is added to the order after payment.
Not sure your 1:10 scale artwork will hold up? Upload it anyway, since the free check picks up size and resolution problems before anything is printed. Or ask first through the contact form.