A Mock-Up Is Not Artwork: Roller Banner Rescued and Delivered a Day Early
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The Venezuelan rum brand Ron Carúpano came through the website quote form on a Thursday night: a 200 × 85 cm roller banner and a 100 × 200 cm PVC banner, needed by Saturday morning, “better Friday afternoon”. Within the hour of the files arriving we flagged that one of them was a mock-up, not print artwork. Corrected file, printed next morning, on its way Friday afternoon — the earlier of the two dates they asked for.
Written by Maciej Antosz, Production Manager at Silver Image London ·
This is an account of one job, not a turnaround promise. Send us yours and we will come back with a firm figure.
Thursday night enquiry, Friday afternoon delivery
The times below are as they sit in the email thread. Note how little of it is printing: the job was decided by a file check that happened before anyone quoted a price.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| Thursday evening | Website quote form: a 100 × 200 cm banner on the 24-hour service, plus a 200 × 85 cm roll-up banner. No deadline given, no files attached. |
| Same evening | Our reply asked the two things that decide whether a rush job is possible: when is the deadline, and please send the files for a quote. Price comes after those, not before. |
| Shortly after | Answer back: needed “no later than Saturday morning, better Friday afternoon”, with a transfer link to the artwork. |
| 18:26 | Files opened the same evening: “I can see a problem already with the 2 × 1 banner — it seems like a mock-up, not suitable for printing, but I’ll confirm.” Confirmed at the same time that the turnaround itself was fine. |
| Friday morning | Production checked both files properly in daylight and the corrected artwork went on press. |
| Friday 12:42 | “All done and on the way to the hotel — it will be this afternoon.” Delivered on the earlier of the two dates the client had asked for. |
Written up from the email thread. Nobody on the thread is named, the delivery address is not published, and no figures from the invoice are. The client, the sizes and the file problem are, because they are the work.
A mock-up is not artwork, and the difference costs a day
This is the most common file problem in urgent print and it almost never announces itself. A mock-up is a picture of the design: the banner shown standing in a room, or the artwork placed on a photograph of a stand, exported at screen resolution to show a client what it will look like. It is made to be looked at. Print artwork is the design itself, at full size, in the right colour space, with bleed.
Open them side by side on a phone and they look identical. Send the first one to a printer and you get a two metre banner built from an image a few hundred pixels wide, with somebody else’s room lighting baked into it.
What matters here is when it was caught. The files landed on Thursday evening and the problem was named on Thursday evening — before the quote was finalised, before anything was scheduled, and with the whole of Friday still available to fix it. Had the same file gone quietly onto the press overnight, the first anyone would have known was Saturday morning, at the venue, with nothing to hang.
Why the deadline question comes before the price
The first enquiry had no date on it. Our reply asked for the deadline before quoting, and that is deliberate: the deadline is part of the specification, not a detail to settle afterwards. A 200 × 85 cm roller banner that has to exist by Saturday morning and the same banner needed in a fortnight are different jobs, produced differently.
Here the answer contained a gift: Saturday morning, better Friday afternoon. Two dates, one of them preferred. Knowing that on Thursday is what made Friday delivery a plan rather than a lucky outcome.
The two-banner order is more common than it looks
A roller banner and a PVC banner do different jobs and most launches need both. The roller banner is the free-standing one: a cassette base, up in thirty seconds, moved between a foyer and a tasting table by one person. The PVC banner is the fixed one — hemmed and eyeletted, tied to a railing or a wall, outdoors if it has to be.
Ordering them together is also the cheaper route, because the artwork is prepared once and both pieces are produced in the same run.
If you are sending artwork for an urgent banner
- Send the working file, not the presentation. If the file shows your design sitting in a room, on a stand, or at an angle, it is a mock-up. The one you want is flat, full size, and usually boring to look at.
- Give the deadline as a date and an hour. This client wrote “Saturday morning, better Friday afternoon” — eight words that told us exactly what to aim at.
- Send files with the enquiry, not after it. We cannot quote a banner properly without seeing what is going on it, and every round trip eats hours you may not have.
- Expect us to say something if the file is wrong. A printer who never queries artwork is not being easy to work with; they are printing whatever arrives.
- Ask for both banner types in one order. Same artwork preparation, same run, and you cover both the free-standing and the fixed position at the venue.
Sizes, fabrics and base options are on the pull-up banner printing page, outdoor grades and finishes on banner printing, and if the deadline is inside the working day, same day printers.
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