What file do you need: PNG, SVG or AI

Two kinds of image file exist and the difference decides everything else here. Raster files are grids of pixels — PNG, JPEG, TIFF, PSD. Vector files are mathematical descriptions of shapes — AI, EPS, SVG, and PDFs that were saved from vector artwork.

A raster image has a fixed amount of detail. Enlarge it and you get the same detail stretched over more inches, which is what blurry means. A vector has no fixed size at all; a logo drawn as vector can be printed at two inches or two metres with identical crispness.

If you have a vector, send the vector

AI, EPS, SVG or a vector PDF. This is the best case and it removes every resolution question from the conversation. We can scale your logo to exactly the print size, adjust it for the garment colour, and separate elements if needed.

Most professionally designed logos exist as vector somewhere, usually sitting with whoever designed them or in an old folder from whichever agency did your branding, and it is worth one email to find out before you settle for a PNG pulled off your own website at whatever size the developer happened to export it.

Send the editable file rather than an export. If the design uses an unusual typeface, outline the text before sending or include the font, otherwise the type may substitute to something else on our machines.

If you do not, send a transparent PNG

PNG at 150 dpi or better at the size it will print. An 11-inch print wants around 1,650 pixels across.

The transparency has to be real. A white background saved into the file prints as white ink, which on a dark shirt means your design arrives inside a white rectangle. Open the file over something dark and look: a checkerboard behind the artwork means genuine transparency, white means a white box.

PNG is also lossless, so it does not add the soft halos that JPEG compression leaves around hard edges.

Formats we will take but would rather not

JPEG works if the resolution is there. It cannot hold transparency and its compression softens edges, so a logo with crisp lines comes through slightly mushy. Fine for a photograph, poor for a logo.

PDF depends entirely on what is inside it. A PDF exported from Illustrator is vector and ideal. A PDF someone made by dropping a screenshot into Word is a low-resolution raster in a wrapper, and it inherits every limitation of that screenshot.

PSD and TIFF are fine, usually large, and generally unnecessary.

Office documents are not artwork. A logo pasted into a Word file or a slide deck has usually been compressed on the way in, so we end up extracting something worse than the original. Send the original.

What we actually do with a bad file

Realistically: most people send something imperfect, and that is fine.

If the artwork is close, we clean it up: remove a background, sharpen edges, adjust for the garment colour. If it is too small to print at the size you want we redraw it, which takes a designer an hour or two depending on how complicated the logo is, and happens without anybody asking you for money or for a decision about file formats. Both are free. Neither requires you to understand any of the above.

What we will not do is print a file we know will look poor and let it arrive as a surprise. If the only version of your logo is a 300-pixel screenshot and you want it 12 inches wide, we will call and tell you so.

If you are choosing a blank at the same time, the blanks guide covers which ones hold fine detail, and dark garments have their own rules.

Send what you have, say what size you want it, and we will tell you where you stand. The design guide has the print area and the edge-case rules for dark garments.