LOW RESOLUTION. True story

When our pre-press team opened the files we finally received from Ben, one of our clients, our graphic designer felt disheartened. All the pictures in the file were low resolution.

Our head of client support had to call Ben to explain that we need hi-res.

“Oksana, darling, please don’t worry about it! I can’t redo the files, so it’s fine as it is.”

“Ben, but the pictures won’t come out nice and sharp! All photos will be with high grit! We don’t want to produce the book of inadequate quality, you know that!“

"Oh, come on! I've already used this file for the previous edition, and everything turned out splendidly, hasn't it?"

Ben’s cockney accent sounded so persuasive that Oksana couldn’t argue any more. She just informed him that we’ll use his current files at his own risk.

I wasn’t happy with this decision, and was even considering calling Ben to persuade him otherwise.

I was on the trip, about to drive from Florence to Bologna. In Italy, when you enter the strada (one of the main highways), you grab a ticket at the booth where the machine prints the date and time stamp. Then at the exit, you enter the ticket into a similar booth, and the machine scans it and requests payment. As simple as that.

Not so simple! When I reached the exit, around midnight, the machine joyously informed me that my ticket couldn’t be read and an operator would speak with me shortly via intercom. Great! My spoken Italian is extremely limited. The operator's English was not any better. We both were in despair!

I don’t know how long I would have been standing there if 15 minutes later a driver of a red Fiat hadn’t stopped to help me out with translation. I was finally free!

The rest of the drive, I was thinking that sometimes low resolution can be quite unpleasant and even dangerous…

P.S. What would you tell to Ben?

P.P.S. What can you see printed on the ticket?