Artwork and Print Specifications for Festival Advertising: A Practical Guide

Most bad festival advertising is not badly designed. It is designed correctly for the wrong conditions.

It was approved on a colour-calibrated monitor, at arm's length, in daylight, at 100% zoom, by someone who already knew what it said.

It will be seen eight feet up, from ten metres away, at night, under red and green pandal lighting, by a person walking past in a crowd who has never heard of you and will give it about a second and a half.

This guide is about designing for the second condition. It is written for the person actually making the file.

The single most useful test

Before anything else, learn this one check, because it catches most failures.

Print your design on an A4 sheet. Pin it to a wall. Walk back three metres. Squint.

If you cannot read the main message, it will fail on an eight-foot banner. A3 at three metres approximates a large banner at realistic viewing distance surprisingly well.

Do this before the file goes anywhere near a printer. It costs one sheet of paper and it has saved more festival budgets than any brief.

Design for night, because that is when people come

Footfall at almost every Indian festival peaks after dark. This is the most consistently ignored fact in festival creative.

What pandal lighting does to your artwork:

• Coloured lighting shifts everything. Red-dominant lighting makes reds glow and turns blues muddy. Green and blue lighting kills warm tones. Whites pick up whatever colour is nearest
• Mid-tones disappear. Anything in the middle of the tonal range flattens into the background
• Subtle gradients become blotches
• Thin type vanishes entirely

What to do about it:

Maximum contrast, always. Dark type on light ground, or light type on dark ground. Nothing in between. A mid-grey on mid-blue design that looks sophisticated on screen is invisible at a pandal.

Heavy weights only. Bold and above for the main message. No light or thin weights anywhere on a banner. No hairline rules.

Avoid relying on colour to carry meaning. If your design only works because the reader distinguishes two similar colours, it will not work.

Solid colour beats gradient. Gradients band badly in large-format print and get destroyed by coloured light.

Test in greyscale. Convert your design to greyscale. If the hierarchy still reads, the contrast is sufficient. If it turns into mush, fix it before printing.

The word limit, by position

Different positions get different amounts of reading time. Write to the position.

| Position | Reading time | Word limit | |---|---|---| | Gate or entrance arch | ~1.5 seconds, walking | 6 words maximum | | Stage backdrop | Glanced at repeatedly over hours | 4–6 words — it is a logo position | | Perimeter banner | 2–3 seconds | 8 words | | Queue banner | Minutes, stationary | A rate table is fine here | | Prasad packet, entry pass | Held, read at leisure | Moderate detail, plus a QR | | Souvenir booklet | Read at home, kept for months | Full detail, terms, floor plans | | LED screen | 8–15 second loop | Very few words, let motion work |

The queue banner is the most misused position in Indian festival advertising. Brands put a logo there. A darshan queue is the only place at a pandal where a person will stand still and read your rate card, your EMI table or your full address. Use it for that.

File and print specifications

Resolution — the rule that surprises people

Large-format print does not need 300 DPI. Viewing distance does the work.

| Print size | Viewing distance | DPI at final size | |---|---|---| | Souvenir booklet page | 30–40 cm | 300 DPI | | Standee, small banner | 1–2 m | 150 DPI | | Large banner (8ft+) | 5–10 m | 72–100 DPI | | Gate arch, very large flex | 10 m+ | 50–72 DPI |

Supplying a 300 DPI file for a twenty-foot gate produces a file of several gigabytes that the printer will downsample anyway.

The safe method: build at 1/10th scale at 300 DPI. A 20ft × 8ft banner becomes 2ft × 0.8ft at 300 DPI, which prints correctly at full size and stays a manageable file.

Formats

Send vector wherever possible — PDF, AI or EPS. Vector scales without loss, which matters enormously at these sizes.

Convert all text to outlines or curves before sending. This is the most common production failure in the whole process. If the printer does not have your font, they will substitute one, and you will discover this when the banner is already hanging. Outlining removes the risk entirely.

Colour mode CMYK, not RGB. Screens are RGB, printers are CMYK. Converting late produces colour shifts, most visibly in bright blues, oranges and greens. Convert early and check.

Rich blacks for large black areas. A single-channel black prints as washed-out dark grey on flex. Ask your printer for their preferred rich black build.

Bleed: 3–5mm for booklets, larger for banners. For flex with eyelets, allow extra at the edges — commonly 2 to 4 inches all round — so the mounting does not eat your content.

The safe area rule

Keep all critical content well inside the edges.

Banners are stretched, folded over frames, punched with eyelets and secured with rope. Content near an edge disappears. On a large flex, keep text and logos at least 6 inches inside the trim on every side, and never put your phone number or QR code near a corner.

Materials, and when each is right

| Material | Use for | Notes | |---|---|---| | Flex / vinyl | Most outdoor banners, gates | Standard, cheap, weather-tolerant | | Star flex / backlit flex | Positions that will be lit from behind | Substantially brighter at night | | Vinyl on sunboard | Standees, small rigid panels | Rigid, clean, indoor | | Fabric / cloth | Indoor halls, premium look | No glare, good for photographs | | Mesh | Very large outdoor, exposed positions | Lets wind through — essential for large exposed banners |

Two practical points that cost brands real money:

Use mesh for large exposed positions. A solid twenty-foot flex acts as a sail. In wind it tears, or it takes the frame down. Mesh survives.

Specify weatherproofing for monsoon-adjacent festivals. Ganesh Chaturthi in Maharashtra falls during or just after the monsoon. Onam likewise. A non-laminated banner that fails on day three of an eleven-day mandal has lost you eight days of exposure. Ask for lamination.

QR codes — the part everyone gets wrong

QR codes at pandals fail for predictable reasons.

Size it for scanning distance. A rough working rule is that the code needs to be about a tenth of the scanning distance. To be scanned from 2 metres, the code needs to be roughly 20cm square. A postcard-sized code on a large banner will never be scanned.

Place it at eye level, not at the top. Nobody photographs a code eight feet up.

High contrast, quiet zone preserved. Black on white. Keep the clear margin around it. Never place a code over a photograph or a gradient.

Test it printed, at distance, at night. Not on screen.

Point it at a direct action, not your homepage — a specific offer page or an order page. And use a unique code per venue, so scans tell you which pandal produced them.

What the committee needs from you, and when

Send exactly what the listing specifies. Every slot on PujaSathi states the exact width and height in feet, the precise position, and the duration. Build to that specification — not to a rounded-off approximation of it.

Send early. Committees print in batches. Late artwork means your banner is printed separately, hurriedly, or not at all.

The souvenir booklet deadline is the earliest and the hardest. Typically about a month before the festival. The book goes to print without you.

Send a large-file link, not an email attachment. Print files exceed email limits routinely. A Drive or Dropbox link is standard and accepted.

Include a low-resolution JPEG preview alongside the print file. It lets the committee confirm at a glance that they have the right artwork the right way up — a genuinely common error.

Name files properly. BrandName_Venue_Gate_20x8ft_v2.pdf beats final_final2.pdf. Across forty venues this matters.

And be clear about who does what

The standard arrangement, and the one PujaSathi enforces on every listing:

You supply artwork only. The committee prints it, installs it, maintains it for the whole festival, and removes it afterwards — at their cost, included in the listed price.

If you are booking directly with a committee outside a platform, write that sentence into your confirmation email. The argument about who was supposed to print happens every single year.

The pre-flight checklist

Before the file leaves your building:

• [ ] Passed the A4-at-three-metres squint test
• [ ] Main message is six words or fewer (gate and backdrop positions)
• [ ] Greyscale test — hierarchy still reads
• [ ] Heavy type only, no thin weights, no hairlines
• [ ] Built at correct scale and DPI for the finished size
• [ ] CMYK, not RGB
• [ ] All text outlined
• [ ] Bleed and generous safe area applied
• [ ] Critical content 6+ inches from every edge
• [ ] QR sized for real scanning distance, at eye level, tested in print
• [ ] Unique response code for this venue
• [ ] Dimensions match the listing exactly
• [ ] Mesh specified if large and exposed; lamination if monsoon-adjacent
• [ ] Filename identifies brand, venue, position, size, version
• [ ] Low-res preview included

After it goes up

Every booking returns three to seven photographs from different angles and a short video of your material installed, with location captured where available.

Look at them as design feedback, not just verification.

Is the type readable in the photograph taken at night? Is the QR code reachable? Did the eyelets eat your phone number? Is the banner lit at all?

That is the only real-world test data you will get, and it is what makes next year's artwork better than this year's.

Check the specifications before you design: browse festivals — every slot states exact width, height, position and duration, so you build to a real measurement rather than a guess.