DIGITAL ART SPECIFICATIONS
FOR SCREENPRINTING & EMBROIDERY

Art comes to us in a large variety of forms and conditions. Sometimes, we're given just a verbal description or a sketch that we use to create original art. Other times, it's a piece of fine art that we scan and clean up. Most of the time, however, art is submitted in some form of a digital file. This page is intended as a guide for your art formats - we hope it helps you prepare your artwork so that we can give you the best possible reproduction.

The following specifications always apply for screenprinted ink which can hold very high resolution and reproduce many artistic effects such as gradients, halftones, etc. They do not always apply for embroidered thread which cannot hold such high resolution or reproduce these effects. As a result, we are often able to work with less precise original artwork than described below for your embroidery work.

We primarily use the popular graphics programs from Adobe: Illustrator and Photoshop (Version CS3 or earlier). Each program has its own features and capabilities, and they are occasionally used together. For graphics preparation, we do not use files from Quark XPress, Pagemaker, Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, nor representative file formats such as .jpeg, .gif or .bmp, except for preview purposes. Some programs, such as Freehand or CorelDRAW, have options which allow you to save the file in Adobe Illustrator's .ai format, which we can open directly in Illustrator.