Sending us your logo: file formats and resolution

A nametag is small, and small print is unforgiving. A logo that looks fine on a screen can come out soft or ragged at an inch across. This is what to send so it does not.

Best: a vector file

Vector artwork is a set of drawing instructions instead of a grid of pixels, so it can be made any size with no loss at all. If your designer sent you a logo package, the vector version is in it.

• .eps and .ai: Illustrator and its interchange format.
• .svg: the web vector format.
• .cdr: CorelDRAW.
• .pdf: often vector inside, but not always. If the PDF came from a photograph it is a picture in a PDF wrapper.

Fine: a large picture

A .png, .jpg, .tiff or .psd works well if it is big enough. The measure is dots per inch at the size it will be printed: 300 dpi is good. On a logo that will sit an inch wide, that means at least 300 pixels across, and more is better, because we would rather shrink your file than stretch it.

A .png with a transparent background is particularly useful on metal, because the brushed finish shows through where the logo has no ink.

What does not work

A logo copied from a website is usually about 100 pixels wide, because that is all a website needs. There is nothing anybody can do to add detail that was never captured. Enlarging it only makes the existing pixels bigger. The same goes for a photograph of a printed business card, and for a screenshot of a logo.

If all you have is a small file, send it anyway. We will tell you honestly whether it will print acceptably, and often we can redraw a simple mark. What we will not do is print something we know will look poor and let you find out when it arrives.

A note on colour

Sublimation puts dye into the surface, so the metal underneath affects the colour. The same blue is slightly warmer on gold than on silver, and brightest on white. We get as close as we can and show you on the proof before anything is made. We cannot promise an exact match to a PMS number, and anyone who does is guessing.