Did You Know? The original Cat In The Hat for the "Suessical" workshop was none other than SCTV's Andrea Martin who has appeared on Broadway in "My Favorite Year" and "Candide." She was nominated for Tony® Awards for both shows, and won for "My Favorite Year."

“I HAVE JUST RECEIVED MY LOGO PACK. NOW WHAT DO I WITH IT?”

The MTI Logo Pack is a relatively new and unique product in the theatrical licensing industry. When Logo Packs were introduced in 1995, most customers simply received their package and handed it off to a graphic design professional or service bureau to produce show programs, posters, advertising or web pages with their licensed show logo. But as technology has become cheaper, faster and more accessible, many customers are finding that they have the desire and capability to produce these things themselves. Hence, the need for this guide arose.

Your Logo Pack contains the following:

1. Logo Slicks featuring color, black & white and/or gray versions of the logo. Using a scanner, you can use these slicks to scan the logos for your own use.
2. CD-ROM (compatible with both PC and Mac) containing tif and/or eps versions of the logos in various sizes and formats.

The purchase of the Logo Pack grants you the rights to use this logo for any promotion, advertising, programs, posters or websites in conjunction with any licensed production of the corresponding MTI show. However, you cannot use the logo for any merchandise or other sold items, such as T-shirts, posters or coffee mugs sold at the show (You may use the logo on items that are made for and given to cast and crew). Also, you are not allowed to modify the logo in any significant way (for example, you cannot put someone else’s face on the Annie character on the Annie logo). If you have any questions concerning the use of your logo, please call us.

The easiest way to use the files (or slicks) to get the show logo onto your program or poster is to enlist the help of a graphic design professional, web designer, service bureau or print shop. But if you want to try to use these files yourself, this guide is here to get you started.

Before using the files, THE FIRST THING YOU SHOULD DO IS TO COPY THE FILES FROM THE CD-ROM ONTO YOUR HARD DRIVE. In the last few years, most problems our customers have had with the Logo Pack files could have been solved with this one simple action. CD-ROMs tend to access data slower than your hard drive.

“WHAT IS A ‘TIF’ FILE?”

Most of the files we have sent you are named “<filename>.tif.” “TIF” (which stands for Tagged Image Format) is the primary file format used by professional graphic designers for image files used for print. This file format differs from the usual JPG or GIF formats you may find on the World Wide Web in some very crucial ways. Our TIF files are designed for PRINTING, not for display on a computer screen (like on the World Wide Web). This means that while screen graphics are saved at a resolution of 72 or 96 dpi (“dots per inch”—a one-inch square area of graphics contains 72 X 72 pixels, for example), our print graphics are saved at 300 or 600 dots per inch. This allows for the greater detail required by the demands of printing. A 72-dpi screen graphic printed out will often look “pixilated,” meaning that you can see a “staircase effect” on the edges on the image when seen printed out. Our TIF files are also saved in “CMYK” format (a format designed for printing), rather than “RGB” format, which is used by all graphics you see on the World Wide Web. You can use a graphic editing program like Adobe Photoshop to change your graphic to RGB format.

“HOW DO I USE THIS TIF FILE IN MY POSTERS, PROGRAMS, ETC.?”

If you haven’t already, the very first thing you should do with our logo disks or CD-ROM is to transfer the files from to your computer’s hard drive (see above).

Once you have done that, your first instinct with the files might be to double-click on the file icon to try and open it. Unlike an executable program (an *.exe on a PC) or a word processing document, you may not be able to simply double click on the TIF files and have it open into one of your installed programs, unless you have a graphics program like Adobe Photoshop already installed in your computer. You will likely be using a program like Microsoft Word or Print Shop to create your programs or posters. The key to using the graphics is to “IMPORT,” “INSERT” or “PLACE” the graphic into a new or existing file.

Start up your program and open a blank or existing document. In your program menus, look for one of the commands (or something similar) mentioned above. In Microsoft Word 98, for example, go to the “Insert” set of menus, and then choose “Picture.” The “Picture” command takes you to another set of commands. In this case you will be inserting the picture “From File.” Find the file on your hard drive and click “OK.” The picture should now be in your document. If you select it, you should be able to drag one of its corners to scale the picture to its appropriate size. If you do not have Microsoft Word, the process should be similar for other programs. Check your manuals or help files for more information.

It is also important to note that when scaling files (changing their size) in a program, it is recommended that you always scale DOWN. If you make the graphics larger (scaling up), you may begin to see pixelization occur.

“WHAT ARE THESE EPS FILES THAT ARE ALSO INCLUDED?”

In addition to tif files, certain Logo Pack disks contain eps (<filename>.eps) files. These are eps files originally generated in Adobe Illustrator 8.0 and are VECTOR versions of the logo files. This means that instead of saving the data as individual pixels, the files are saved as vector equations, or more accurately, closer to the language that a computer printer speaks. This allows you to scale the
graphic to any size (as large as the side of a building or as small as the head of a pin) and not lose any detail whatsoever (limited to your final printing process).

Generally EPS files are more difficult to use and less compatible than TIF files. They are imported into programs just like TIFs, but often they will not display on screen at full resolution, or in some cases at all. However, the image may still print out correctly.

If you wish to use the EPS files and have never used them before, we suggest you contact a graphic design professional.

“WHY DO MY TIF FILES LOOK TERRIBLE ON MY WEBSITE?”

We believe that the primary use of the color files we send out are going to be used for printing purposes. Therefore, we have saved them at 300 dpi and in a format called CMYK (Cyan/Magenta/Yellow/K(black)). These files are ready-to-use for “4-color” process.

RGB (Red/Green/Blue) graphics are graphics designed for screen display. These files are used in situations such as websites or Powerpoint presentations.

Using a graphic-editing program like Photoshop (or similar program), you can easily convert our CMYK graphics to RGB.