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Artwork Guidelines
- Introduction
- Logo Cleanup vs. Creative Services
- Embroidery Art Guidelines
- Screen-printing Art Guidelines
- Guidelines for other processes
We know you want to get your logo on your shirts, caps, or other products with a minimum of work and hassle on your end. On the other hand, the quality of your finished product depends entirely on the quality of the art that is used to produce that product. We will work with you to make ordering as simple and painless as possible at the lowest cost to you, and we will inform you of any additional charges needed to bring your artwork up to specifications before proceeding further.
Logo Cleanup - What if my art isn't up to specifications?
Assuming you have a clean copy of something which we can work from, it generally means that we can give it to a "clean-up" artist who can generally create finished artwork tailored for the product you are purchasing. This generally adds 2-3 days to the order timetable and costs $30-50. We will discuss any modifications that might be needed for your particular process. For example, if your logo is ornate and uses three colors on your letterhead, we might suggest simplifications to it and create a one color version if the printing process required for the product you've chosen (or your budget) only allows for one color.
Creating a truly new logo is a more complex process. If you have a design concept in mind and can provide a sketch for us to work from, we can generally create two or three versions for your approval in a week or so at a cost of $100-150, depending on the complexity of your concept. If you have no idea what you want in a logo at all, we stand ready to guide you through the process of creating a professional image package for your company at the rate of $45 per hour. The end result will be a logo which works well in a variety of formats and befits your company image, and it will be provided to you on CD-ROM for use in commercial printing ,brochure creation, and other processes.
Artwork for embroidery is far less exacting than that required for all other processes, because the artwork is just a starting point for digitizing, which is the process of converting the logo into a design which will actually run on our embroidery equipment. In general, any file or piece of printed material which shows the logo in full color at about the same size that the finished design will be will work.
Keep in mind that not all designs can be done in embroidery, regardless of the quality of the artwork. For example, small text (less than 1/4" high) often creates difficulties, especially when sewing on thin knit materials such as polos and tee-shirts. Fine detail can also pose problems. We can often simplify fine details to create a version of your logo which will sew well and look good.
Color shading is another problem area in embroidery. In printing, a color can be "faded." For example, large letters can be darker at the top than at the bottom. This is practically impossible in embroidery, except for very large designs. Generally, we can leave color shading out of a logo and it still looks good. Part of the purpose of color shading techniques is to make the logo appear to be more 3-dimensional, and embroidery brings a real 3-dimensional texture to your logo on its own.
You will always get an opportunity to see the final product before we sew the garments.
An important distinction needs to be made between the process of doing artwork versus creating an embroidery design ("digitizing"). Digitizing is a process unique to embroidery, and in fact is done for the exact size and product that the logo will be sewn on. For example, the same design may be digitized differently depending on whether it's being sewn on a cap or shirt. Also, the make and model of the embroidery equipment affects the file format. For this reason, we never release digitizing files to customers, because we are not in the business of producing digitizing and cannot guarantee the results on home equipment, other brands, or even other models of embroidery equipment.
Screen-printing requires finished artwork which is about 300 dots per inch (dpi) or equivalent at the finished size or better. Also, since each color is printed as a separate screen, the artwork must allow for color separation. Electronic formats such as .jpg, and .gif do not allow for this technique, and are usually quite "coarse," as 72 dpi is the standard resolution for the web and desktop publishing. So if you are providing finished art for screenprinting, it must be an .eps or .tif file. These formats are supported by most professional grade graphics programs and allow our art department to create separations needed to burn screens.
Guidelines for other processes
Various imprinting processes each have their own sets of problems. We will work with you in the product selection phase and during the design process for best results. Here are a few basics to keep in mind:
- ALL artwork for anything other than embroidery has to be a vector-based .eps file, with fonts converted to curves.
- Different products have different imprint areas and sizes. Obviously, a pencil or pen lends itself to a wide, short logo, for example.
- Some products can only be imprinted in one color. Almost all multi-color processes require that a product be imprinted at least once for each color printed. In turn, this requires that the product has to be held in some type of jig or platen and printed in exactly the same place for multiple passes. A foam stress ball, for example, squishes a little bit every time it's struck and therefore cannot be printed with a multi-color logo (unless the registration can be VERY broad. See next point).
- Different products and processes allow for different registration tolerances. Registration is the alignment of the logo colors with each other. Most of our processes keep this alignment within a fraction of an inch, but depending on exactly how wide this registration is, certain effects may be impossible (or at least unwise) to try to accomplish.
- Different products and processes allow for different levels of half-tones. Half-tones allow colors to fade gradually, and is a common effect that allows for shadow effects, fine details, etc. Some processes allow for finer half-tones, which allows for more subtle detailed effects, and others allow only very coarse half-tones or none at all. For example, foil stamping is a process that allows no half-tones at all.
We will work with you to get the best results for your logo and budget.
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