EMBROIDERY ARTWORK RECOMMENDATIONS

Many customers are not familiar with embroidery production, nor what makes for a good high-quality embroidered product. Even many professional designers are unaware what artwork should be for embroidery or screen printed textiles versus paper printing.

TEXT differs greatly from printed fonts. The detail of the font and the minimum size is limited. For example a 12 pt. font can be printed well on a brochure, looks good as a web file, but is impossible to reproduce with needle and thread.

Generally speaking fonts below 20 pts. do not sew well. The more detailed the font the larger it needs to be. For small embroidery use a simple font like Arial. Fonts below 24 pts. generally lose the unique features of the font and appear as simple block lettering. Fonts should not be spaced closely together in order to prevent the letters from sewing on top of each other. Remember stay large, bold and simple for the best product.

COLORS: Designs should be reduced to spot colors. Most web art is rendered in hundreds of colors, shades, blends, etc. which is not useable for embroidery. Our embroidery machines can produce up to 15 thread colors. Most corporate logos contain 3 to 4 colors. When designing a logo an ILLUSTRATION should always be used over a photographic design. Small details below 3/4inch need to be omitted. Photo editing effects such as shadowing, color fading, blends and bleeding, metallic fibers and blurring are not useable for embroidery. A Photoshop or Corel rendered shadow may contain 32 shades of gray, imagine trying to produce this in thread.

OUTLINES of objects or text need to be a minimum size (1.5mm or thicker). Outlining small text or object is NOT recommended as it will not produce clearly.

SIZE of your finished logo, including text, should be limited to 3 – 4.5″ wide for left-chest emblems on polo shirts or t-shirts. Cap embroidery is limited by the width of the front panel and the area from the visor to the crown. A cap logo should be no taller than 2.25″ and about 3 – 4″ wide.

ARTWORK FILES for embroidery should be sent to us as .eps (encapsulated postscript) file only. Web graphics (.gif, .jpg, jpeg) and Bitmaps are harder to recreate in an embroidery file. Faxed graphics are not useable. Business cards are usually to small and distorted to be copied. email us with questions on sending your design.

We work with .dst files , these are locked images. Once a file has been digitized the only part of the image that can be changed is the color of the thread, without incurring additional artwork fees.

Send us your image and we will quote you.

Accepted digital artwork formats
CDR- CorelDraw -AI – Adobe Illustrator -EPS – Encapsulated Post ScriptPSD – Adobe Photoshop -DST – Embroidery format
PUB – Microsoft Publisher format