Ask a decorator for a quote and you will usually get a question back before you get a price: “Do you have vector art?”

You can order without it. Our designers work with whatever a client sends, and if your logo needs rebuilding, we rebuild it. Depending on the artwork, that may add some time or cost to the job. But the bigger thing is that a rebuild is a redraw, and a redraw is an interpretation. Someone traces your mark shape by shape and gets very close to it. On a logo you’ll be putting on apparel, drinkware, and signage for the next five years, that gap is worth understanding.

So the real answer to why we ask is fidelity. Vector art is how you guarantee that what comes off the press is the logo your designer drew, down to the curve.

What is a vector file?

A vector file stores your artwork as math: points, lines, curves, and the colors that fill them. It doesn’t record what the logo looks like at one particular size. It records the instructions for drawing it at any size.

That property has a name: vector art is scalable. It’s the whole reason the format exists.

What’s the difference between vector and raster?

A raster image is a fixed grid of colored squares called pixels. Every photo your phone takes is raster. Anything painted in Photoshop is raster. The grid works beautifully for photographs, where you want thousands of subtle shifts in tone that nobody could draw by hand, and it captures a sunset in a way vector never could.

The limit is that the grid has a set number of squares, decided the moment the file was made. Blow the image up and you don’t get more detail, you get bigger squares. That’s what people mean by “pixelated.”

Think of raster as grains of sand arranged into a picture, and vector as pieces of colored paper cut into shapes. Enlarge the sand and you see sand. Enlarge the paper and the cut edges stay clean.

Can’t you just upsample a small logo?

You can, and it works better than it used to. Upsampling software, including the AI-assisted kind now built into most image editors, adds pixels by predicting what belongs there. On photographs the results are often convincing.

On logos there’s a catch, and it’s specific. The software is inventing detail, and invented detail on a logo is wrong detail: letterforms shift slightly, corners round off, a curve drifts a few degrees from the one your designer drew. You get something that looks sharp without being quite your mark. Upsample a photo background nobody will study. For the logo itself, upsampling lands you in the same fidelity problem as a hand rebuild, just by a different route.

Why do decorators ask for vector art?

Five reasons, and only the first one is the famous one.

Clean scaling. The same logo goes on a pen barrel and a trade show banner. Raster art that looks fine on a screen turns soft or jagged when it’s scaled up for a large imprint.
Exact color matching. In vector art we can select each individual shape and assign it a specific Pantone (PMS) number, which is how your blue stays the same blue across a tee, a hat, a pen, and a water bottle ordered months apart. Raster art blends colors at every edge, so there’s often no single value to match to.
Editability. Real jobs need real edits: separating elements, dropping a background, converting a full-color mark to a one-color imprint for a small item, resizing a tagline that’s illegible at two inches. All of that needs the actual shapes rather than a flattened picture of them.
Screens are binary. In screen printing, every color gets its own screen, and ink either passes through or it doesn’t. There’s no such thing as 40% of a pixel. Vector art is made of hard-edged color objects that map onto that reality directly. Raster art carries anti-aliasing, the ring of blended in-between pixels that keeps edges looking smooth on a monitor, and every one of those has to be resolved to one side or the other before it can become a screen. (Gradients get handled by halftones, a grid of dots that vary in size so they read as a continuous tone from a few feet back. Halftones are applied when the art is separated and work from either kind of file. What they can’t repair is an edge that was soft to begin with.)
Cut processes follow paths. Heat transfer vinyl, laser engraving, and die cutting all trace a physical path. No path, no cut.

If you want the full picture of how these methods differ, our complete guide to screen printing and embroidery covers the production side in depth.

Does embroidery need vector art?

Much less than people assume, and this is the exception worth knowing.

Embroidery never prints your file. It runs from a digitized file, a stitch-by-stitch program somebody writes for the machine, choosing stitch types, angles, densities, underlay, and the order the needles lay it all down. That’s a manual craft that starts from looking at your logo rather than from converting it, and digitizers often work quite happily from a clear raster image.

What actually matters for embroidery is whether the art is legible at the size it will be stitched, and what someone decides to do about the details too fine to render in thread, which on a left-chest logo or a cap front is most of them. Vector gives a digitizer clean edges to read. It doesn’t remove any of the real work.

Which file types are vector?

AI, EPS, PDF, and SVG can all hold vector art. JPG, PNG, GIF, TIF, BMP, and PSD are always raster.

Now the part worth knowing: those four vector formats are containers, not guarantees. Each one can just as easily hold a plain raster image inside it. The most common version we see is a client opening their JPG logo and choosing “Save As PDF.” It’s the same pixel logo in a fancier envelope. The same thing happens with AI and EPS files that have an image placed inside them.

So the extension never settles it. Check the file.

A warning about SVG files

SVG is technically a vector format, and in practice it’s the least reliable one we receive.

SVGs are usually machine-generated exports from web tools and logo generators rather than files a designer made deliberately. They frequently arrive incomplete or auto-traced: fonts drop out, colors shift, and shapes break when professional software opens them. Treat an SVG as a fallback rather than a win. If it’s the only vector file you have, send it, and also ask your designer whether an AI, EPS, or designer-made PDF exists somewhere.

How can you tell if your logo is vector?

Two tests, neither of which needs design software.

The zoom test. Drag the file onto a Chrome or Edge window, or open a PDF in Preview or Acrobat Reader, and zoom to somewhere between 400% and 800% on a curved edge or a letter. Crisp and smooth at any zoom means vector. Blurry, fuzzy, or blocky means raster, whatever the extension says.

The select test. In a PDF, try clicking or dragging across the artwork. If the whole logo selects as one rectangular block, it’s a raster picture sitting inside a PDF. If you can highlight individual pieces of text or individual shapes, that’s a good sign it’s real vector art.

One clue before you open anything: file size tells you something. A simple logo saved as a PDF under about 100 KB is often genuinely vector, while a multi-megabyte PDF of a simple logo usually has a photo buried in it. That’s a hint rather than proof, so run the zoom test anyway.

And it’s worth checking your own website. Plenty of sites serve their logo as an SVG that you can save straight off the page, and many companies have a press or media page with a proper download kit in it, sometimes including EPS or PDF versions. What you can’t do is assume what you’re getting. Right-clicking and saving hands you whatever that page happens to use, which might be a high-resolution PNG, a small compressed one, or real vector art. Look at the extension you end up with, then run the tests. If it turns out to be an SVG, send it, and keep the caveat above in mind: useful, and still not the same thing as the file your designer built.

What are your options if you have a JPG?

Send it. We’ll work with it, and for plenty of jobs you’ll never see the difference. Depending on what the logo needs, redrawing it may add some time or cost, and it always carries that small risk of drift from your real branding.

Ask whoever designed the logo for the original working file. Not an export, not a copy: the layered AI, EPS, or designer-made PDF they actually built it in. If an agency or a freelancer made your logo, they have this file even when nobody at your company does. While you’re asking, request the brand guide too, since it hands us your PMS colors and fonts in one shot.

Three things worth knowing when you go looking:

A flattened export is the weakest kind of vector. When a designer exports a final file, layers merge and separate elements fuse into a single shape. It’s still vector, and it’s the least workable vector there is.
An auto-trace is not the real thing. Some tools convert a raster logo to vector automatically. The result is technically vector and visibly wrong: lumpy curves, wobbly edges, colors that drift off brand. The shapes are genuine vector shapes; they were just traced from the pixels instead of drawn from your designer’s original.
Don’t convert anything yourself before sending it. Saving your JPG as a PDF or running it through an online SVG converter makes the file look correct without changing what’s inside it, and it can hide what you actually have. Send us the files untouched, all of them, and we’ll pick the best one.

One detail for your designer, if you reach them: we prefer text with fonts converted to curves (sometimes called outlines). That turns each letter into a shape, so your logo renders correctly on our end even though we don’t own your fonts.

Does raster art ever work for custom decoration?

Yes. Full-color digital printing changed the answer. DTF, DTG, and sublimation all print a raster image directly onto the garment, which means photographs, gradients, watercolor effects, and full-color illustrations reproduce faithfully without a single vector path involved. Our comparison of DTF, DTG, and Digital Squeegee walks through what each one does well.

The rule for those methods is resolution rather than format: your art wants to be roughly 300 dpi at the size it will actually print. A 12-inch back print needs about 3,600 pixels across. If your file is 800 pixels wide, it will print beautifully at two and a half inches and fall apart at twelve.

So here’s the practical version. Screen printing, vinyl, engraving, and pad printing want vector. Full-color digital methods want high-resolution raster. Embroidery mostly wants clarity. And a logo needs a vector master regardless, because you can’t predict now which product someone will want it on in two years.

Why do the best logos vectorize easily?

The logos that survive every process are bold, simple, and readable at an inch wide. That’s the constraint that produced them.

A mark that has to work embroidered on a beanie, engraved on a tumbler, screen printed in two colors, and blown up on a booth backdrop gets simplified until it can. Marks that carry fine gradients and a dozen colors ask more of every process they meet. We made a related argument in Nobody Loves Your Logo More Than You Do: restraint is what makes a logo work on physical products.

Send us the file you have

You don’t need to sort any of this out before you talk to us. Our Lindon shop runs thousands of tees a month, and we’ve seen every kind of logo file that exists. Send everything you’ve got and our graphic designers will tell you what it is, whether it holds up at the size you want, and what it needs before it goes to press. Getting art production-ready is a normal part of the job here.

If you’re ready to price a project, send your logo along with your quote request and we’ll tell you in the first reply exactly what we’re working with.