Other things to know about artwork
There are a number of other things that you should know about artwork before you submit it with your rough sketch and ad reservation form. Some forms of artwork are acceptable and some are not, and it will save you and your advertisers a lot of time and aggravation if you understand the differences from the beginning.

Most newspapers have invested money in modern graphics systems and peripherals including scanners for scanning photographs, slide scanners for scanning slides and CDs with a huge variety of stock photographs. But, the newspaper industry can be slow to change and some of you may be working for smaller newspapers which still do some things the traditional way. If you do, don't feel bad about this-the more traditional ways of producing ads are just as effective, you just need to be aware of which technology is available at your paper.

In general, art should be clean and its image area should not be stapled, taped, written upon or marked in any way. The only exception is that at many newspapers it can be a good idea to write your name and territory number along the outside the image area if there is space. But never enter the image area or it may be rendered useless to you and the artists.

The first thing you need to know is that it's always better to get artwork for an ad directly from the advertiser. This saves the art department the time of trying to find generic artwork that may suit the ad and will almost always be more appropriate and more effective in terms of response. For example if your account sells furniture, it's always better to get brochures and photos from the accountÐperhaps those provided to him by the manufacturer--because your art department is likely to have only a limited selection of artwork of furniture that may or may not accurately represent the account's selection.

Often, artists that are not provided with artwork from the salesperson are forced to use line art from clip art books. That brings us to the second thing you need to know. Line art, or line drawings of products, while it is often better than nothing, is usually not as good as a photograph of the product. If the line artwork is not done very well, it can give the ad a down scale look. Now that's fine if the furniture store is a down scale store and wants people to get the feeling from the look of the ad that they will get a deal, however if the store is actually targeting an upscale market, they usually will be able to convey that most effectively with photographs. Of course there are always exceptions and I'm sure there are plenty of upscale stores using very elegant line drawings in their ads. But in general, it's always better to provide the artists with more than enough artwork so they can select the very best images to use in your ad.