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Welcome to Mahoney. We're glad you're here.
Giveaways, promo items, company stores, swag.
Welcome to Mahoney. We're glad you're here.
You have your awesome artwork, your super-cool logo. It is there on your screen looking clean and sharp, but how do you get it from your screen to an actual product you can hold in your hands? And how do you make sure that beautiful logo stays nice and clear? The type of file you send to us makes a world of difference. Here’s a brief overview of common image types and why vector files are always the better choice for printing logos.
Raster files are made up of pixels. Pixels are the tiny, neatly arranged squares that together make up an image. The more pixels your image has, the higher quality it will be. These types of files can work well for web, and are ideal for highly detailed photography, but they don’t work well when your art needs to be constantly resized for printing. This is because raster images are limited by their pixel count (ppi: pixels per inch, also called dpi: dots per inch), which directly affects the quality. This means increasing the size of an image made up of too few pixels will cause pixelation — making the image look fuzzy and distorted. That’s why, for logos that often need to be used on a variety of products at varying sizes, we recommend them to be in vector form.
Vector files are almost always the right answer. Unlike raster files, vector files do not use pixels. Instead, they use lines and curves positioned using points on a grid. In other words, the file uses math to build your art at any scale; this means you can infinitely increase and decrease the size without losing quality, making it the ideal format for logo files that often need to be scaled to fit on everything from a small business card to a huge billboard.
Tip: If you are unsure if your logo is raster or vector, zoom in on it. If the edges begin to look pixelated, it is raster. If it stays looking sharp and crisp, it is vector.
Placing a raster file into a program/software and saving it as one of the vector formats listed above will NOT turn it into a vector! Vector files remember the path used to create a logo. If you try to save a raster image as a vector, the file will not have a path to follow — that was stripped away the moment the logo was saved in raster format. Additionally, please do not use Illustrator’s, or any other program’s, Image Trace feature to turn a raster file into vector art. This often causes imperfections that are obvious when the art is scaled up or looked at closely. A vector file of your logo should always be obtainable from the person who created the mark.
Vector files store the steps it took to create your art, which allows us to resize your art over and over without losing quality. Raster files merely store the fixed amount of pixels that make up your art, which can cause pixelation and loss of quality when resized.
Vector is always the right answer! While raster files work sometimes, vector is guaranteed to produce the highest quality result.
Resources: adobe.com