Design Your Graphic for Embroidery—Strengthen and Minimize!

When converting your business logo or other graphic design into embroidery, some elements can get lost in translation.

In order to turn your carefully designed graphic into custom embroidery stitches, the designer must first digitize your design. This is where trouble spots could occur.

Below, we’ll describe the things to watch for in order to transform your graphic into the best-looking custom embroidery.
 

1. Give your embroiderer the largest, best-quality graphic you can

Many times, the graphic needs to be enlarged to appropriate size for embroidering. Enlarging can cause pixelation. The finer details disappear, and the edges can be square or randomly jagged. The missing detail has to be filled in by the digitizer (designer) or embroiderer. To make sure your design is embroidered precisely the way you envision it, provide as much detail as you can. This means giving your embroiderer the highest-resolution graphic possible.
 

2. Reduce fine, light-colored lines

Fine lines or outlines in white, yellow, or similarly light colors never look quite like you would expect. This is simply due to the nature of embroidery. It takes a series of thin stitches to embroider a fine line, and the negative space left by these stitches can make the line look dotted.

Consider darkening the fine details to make sure they “show up” in embroidery.
 

3. Eliminate gradients where you can

Gradients — colors that fade from one into another — can only be approximated by embroidery. That is, different colored threads can be overlapped to fool the eye into thinking there is a gradient. Be aware that this can make your design lose some clarity. We recommend converting these areas in your design to solid colors for a clearer, more vibrant look.
 

4. Make sure text isn’t too small—¼ inch minimum

Consider that ¼ inch is the magic height. Your embroidery needs to be read at arm’s length or further. If is difficult and generally unreadable to embroider text smaller than that. It’s possible to get smaller text by choosing fabrics like nylon and by using a more expensive, finer thread. Generally, though, it’s not recommended that you limit your choices this way.
 

5. Have a Trusted Designer Optimize Your Work

Make sure your printing and embroidery shop has someone who is experienced in the optimization process. Often, they know the process like the back of their hands and can whip out an optimized sample much more efficiently than you can. Simply asking for help may save you a huge hassle!