Other things to know about artwork
Most of the time, the best kinds of artwork you can provide to your artists includes glossy color and black and white photographs, and at most newspapers; slides, transparencies and negatives can now be used.

If your newspaper doesn't have the ability to work with some of these forms of artwork, you or your account can usually convert it into something your art department can work with. For example, if your newspaper doesn't have a negative scanner, you or your account can take the negative to almost any one hour photo lab and have a print made.

It's likely that your artists will be able to handle anything you give them, but ask around and you'll quickly find out the capabilities at your paper. Here are some things that most newspapers won't be able to easily work with, but will probably accept them and try to work with them anyway:

Prescreened materials, or artwork that has a visible dot pattern, can cause some problems. Almost everything in published form has a screen or dot pattern although most of the time it is imperceptible. Once art is broken into a dot pattern, it can't be scaled down without pushing those dots together, which results in the dots filling in and creating black splotches in your ad. Artists will try to salvage this by creating a second dot pattern on top of the first. This unfortunately creates a "moray" pattern, which looks like a "plaid" or chain-link fence pattern on the artwork. Your artists should be able to minimize this with their computers, however it isn't an ideal situation and the more of a dot pattern you see on the artwork given to you by the advertiser, the harder it will be to work with.

Other types of artwork that are difficult to work with are tearsheets, faxes and copies made from copies. If your account sends you a logo or artwork over a fax machine or asks you to take it from a tearsheet, your artists will almost always need to recreate the art by hand or by using a computer drawing program. While most papers encourage their artists to help create and recreate logos and art when necessary, it is very time consuming and it would be much better for you to provide the art in any other way possible.