What artwork files you need before printing a logo

Almost every delay on a branded gift order comes back to the same thing: the artwork. Not the design itself, which is usually fine, but the file it arrives in. A logo that looks perfect in a presentation can fall apart the moment it has to be cut into a screen, engraved into steel or pressed into leather. Here is what to send, and what usually goes wrong.

Vector first, if you have it

A vector file describes your logo as shapes and curves rather than as a grid of coloured dots. That means it can be scaled to any size without losing its edge, which matters because the same logo might be 12 mm across on a pen and 200 mm across on a tote bag. Look for a file ending in AI, EPS, SVG or PDF. If your designer built the identity properly, one of these exists somewhere, usually in the folder nobody opened since the rebrand.

If you only have a logo pulled off your own website or lifted from a slide deck, send it anyway. We will tell you whether it is workable at the size you need. Sometimes it is, and sometimes the honest answer is that it needs to be redrawn.

When a raster file is fine

PNG and JPG are raster formats, made of pixels. They work for full colour printing, but only when the resolution is high enough at the printed size. As a rule of thumb, aim for 300 dpi at the finished dimensions. A 500 pixel wide PNG is fine on a screen and fine on a pen clip; the same file stretched across the front of a bag will show soft, stepped edges.

One thing raster files rarely handle well is a clean edge against the product. If the logo sits on a white square, that white square will print unless it is removed, and removing it cleanly is only possible when the file was made with transparency in the first place.

Outline the type

If your logo contains a wordmark set in a font, outline it before sending. Outlining converts the letters into shapes, so the file no longer depends on that font being installed on our machine. If it is not outlined and we do not have the font, the software substitutes something else, and the substitution is rarely subtle. You will see it immediately on the proof, but it is one more round of messages neither of us needed.

Lines and small type have a floor

Every branding method has a point below which detail stops surviving. A hairline that reads beautifully on screen can break up in a screen print, fill in on a deboss or vanish entirely on an engraving. As a working minimum, keep lines above 0.3 mm and text above 5 pt at the printed size.

This matters most on small items. A pen barrel, a USB body or a keyring gives you a printing area of a few centimetres, and a logo with fine serifs or a thin outer ring will lose those details at that scale. The usual fix is a simplified version of the mark for small applications, which is worth preparing once and keeping in the brand folder.

Colour: what can be matched, and what cannot

If your brand has Pantone references, send them. Screen printing mixes ink to a specific colour and matches closely. Digital UV printing builds colour from process inks, so it gets near but not exact, and very saturated brand colours are where the gap shows most.

Two methods carry no colour at all. Laser engraving removes a layer of the material and reveals what is underneath, so the colour comes from the steel, the wood or the leather itself. Deboss presses the shape into the surface with no ink whatsoever. If your brand is built entirely around one colour, those two methods change how the logo reads, and it is worth seeing a sample before committing a whole order to them.

Arabic and bilingual lock ups

If your logo has an Arabic version, or a bilingual lock up with both scripts, send it as outlined vector. Arabic letterforms connect to each other and change shape depending on their position in the word, so live text is far more fragile than Latin type when a font is missing. An outlined file removes the risk entirely.

It is also worth telling us which version is the primary one and how the two should sit relative to each other, because a lock up that was designed for a letterhead does not always fit the printing area on a bottle.

Send one folder, not one file

The most useful thing you can send is a small folder containing the primary logo in vector, a single colour version in black, a reversed version in white, and the Pantone references if you have them. Between those four, almost any product and any method can be covered without coming back to you.

What happens to the file after you send it

We check it against the product and the method, lay it out at the size and position it will be produced at, and send back a digital proof. Nothing goes into production until you approve that proof. We lay out the artwork you supply; redrawing a logo or designing one from scratch is separate work and is not part of a standard quotation.

If you are not sure which branding method your logo suits in the first place, the branding methods page goes through all seven and what each one can and cannot hold.