Large format / wide format
Oversized printing for banners, posters, and signage, on rolls or rigid boards, where viewing distance lets you drop resolution hard.
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What it is
Large format (or wide format) means output wider than a sheet press can handle, roughly 18 inches and up: posters, retractable banners, vinyl, mesh fence wraps, fabric backdrops, vehicle graphics, and rigid boards on a flatbed UV printer. It is nearly all inkjet, running either roll-fed media or rigid sheets across a flatbed, which changes the economics: one-off pieces are cheap, and the substrate choice matters more than the ink.
The idea that saves you is that resolution scales with viewing distance. A poster read at three feet wants 150ppi at final size, a banner read at fifteen feet is fine at 50 to 100, and billboard art is routinely built at 10 to 20ppi full size. Standard practice is to build the file at 1:10 scale and label it clearly. Same logic for type: roughly one inch of cap height per ten feet of viewing distance.
Gotchas that bite first-timers: bleed is not 3mm here, it can be two or three inches for pole pockets, hems, and stretch frames, and retractable banners hide several inches at the bottom inside the cassette. Finishing (grommets, hems, wind slits or mesh) has to be decided before layout, not after. Colors also drift hard between substrates, so the same file on gloss vinyl and matte fabric are visibly different pieces: ask the shop for a substrate proof rather than trusting your monitor.
Ask AI for it
Design artwork for a 33in by 79in retractable roller banner for [brand] using the hardware supplier's own template. Take the bleed, cassette allowance, and safe margins from that template rather than inventing them, and derive the bottom feed allowance from the stand specification. If you build at 1:10 scale, work at 3.3in by 7.9in and divide every final-size measurement by ten, then state both the scaled and the final-size value for each one so nothing gets mixed. Portrait. Put the headline and logo in the top third at eye level, cap height large enough to read from 15 feet, one clear message, minimal body copy. Full-bleed flat color background, vector logo and type only, CMYK, and no fine detail or hairlines that would fall apart at 100ppi.