Advertise in PARKING

Submitting Ad Materials to PARKING Magazine

After you have your advertising contract with NPA completed and your advertisement is designed and ready to print, there are three ways you can submit your materials to PARKING magazine:

• Upload your files via our FTP site, then FAX (202) 296-3102, or mail in a hard copy proof. Click here for FTP access information.
• Put everything on a disk (CD-R or DVD-R) and mail to:

      PARKING Magazine
      1112 16th Street NW, Suite 840
      Washington, DC 20036.

  Please also print out a hard-copy proof and a page showing the contents of the disk, and indicate which is the main document file.

• If your files are smaller than 3mb total you may send your ad by email attachment. This isn't the best way, though, since the technical difficulties involved with encoding and attaching files to email messages (especially though AOL) make this method often problematic. It is recommended that you ZIP or STUFF the files into one archive before sending.

The quality of your printed ad depends entirely on what you send us, so please read all of these instructions.

The Basics

Preparing ad materials for offset printing is a complex and exacting science, and is very different from making and printing an ad on your computer. If it is not done properly, the results can be unpredictable. We therefore recommend that you engage a professional advertising agency or design studio to produce your materials. If you do everything yourself, we’ll do our best to accommodate, but we can’t guarantee that you’ll be completely happy with the results.

Hard Copy

We must have a hard-copy printed proof of your advertisement before we can proceed. If your ad is in color, a good-quality color print (match-print quality IRIS or Fiery proofs are ideal) should be sent by USPS mail or overnight express. If your ad is black-and-white, you may fax a proof to us (202) 296-3102.

Graphic Program Formats

Press-Optimized PDF

This is the best and most reliable way to send ads. All PDFs will be converted to 300dpi TIFF images for printing. Be sure to set your Acrobat Distiller for "Press Optimized" Settings. This will save the images at high resolution, and will embed the fonts in the file. If you don't choose Press Optimized, other fonts will be substituted, and they may not match what you used. PDF is a good option, and we will do our best to reproduce your ad as faithfully as possible.

QuarkXPress 6.5

This is the preferred application for constructing your advertisement. PARKING magazine is produced using this program, so everything we receive is rebuilt within our QuarkXPress documents. Please use the "Collect for Output" function, or—even better—Flightcheck® to collect your job.

Adobe Illustrator EPS

This is a good option for constructing ads, mainly because you can "Convert to Paths" all of the type. Please do. You won’t need to include the font files. Be sure to save the files as Illustrator EPS (not as Illustrator .ai).

Word or WordPerfect

These programs are acceptable, but not recommended because of their limitations (they are, after all, word processing—not graphic layout—programs). Any ads sent as word processing documents will be reconstructed in QuarkXPress, and it is especially critical that you include any placed images as SEPARATE files.

Adobe PageMaker or InDesign

PARKING does not currently support these programs -- please send your ad as a Press Optimized PDF.

Images

Placed photographic (Photoshop) images must be CMYK mode (or Grayscale if b/w), 300dpi at actual (100%) placed size, cropped closely to the way they are used in the ad (to avoid sending unnecessarily large files), and saved as TIFF, EPS, or the least-preferred JPEG. (This type of compression deletes data from the file, degrading the image quality). Color images done this way are about 350K per square inch (a full-bleed page is 34MB).

Please do not attempt to send files that are 50MB, 60MB, 100MB or larger. Placed vector graphics (Illustrator) must be CMYK, and may be any size. Except when you send a press-optimized PDF, it is absolutely, positively essential that you include all of your placed images as SEPARATE files, along with your original document file. Photos that are placed or pasted into a page-makeup program cannot be output properly by our printing company without the original image files. If you don’t supply your original files (as TIF, EPS, or JPEG) separately, we will have to use the low-resolution placeholder image, and we can’t guarantee that you’ll be completely happy with the results.

Fonts

Except when you send a press-optimized PDF, it is also absolutely, positively essential that you provide all of the fonts you use to construct your ad—screen fonts and printer fonts—as SEPARATE files. TrueType fonts (the kind that came loaded on your PC) are not compatible with the equipment that is used to output the magazine. If you send us TrueType fonts—or no fonts at all—we will have to substitute something similar, and we can’t guarantee that you’ll be completely happy with the results.

Colors

Any colors you use must be defined as CMYK. If you use RGB-defined colors (the kind that come as defaults with most programs) they will be converted by us to CMYK. Since CMYK builds do not exactly match RGB formulas, once again, we can’t guarantee that you’ll be completely happy with the results.