AI Guidelines and How to Supply Artwork | Custom Branded Workwear & Merchandise

ARTWORK – AI ISSUES

Here’s a little information about why AI created logos are often not suitable for print and/or embroidery.

AI logos won’t work in common situations

Colours: Best practice in logo design is to define a palette of 3-5 brand colours that appear in the logo. These colours are then deployed throughout the brand assets (website, social media, business cards, product labels) consistently. That consistency, where customers see your unique combination of colour/font/shape/style over and over is what gains you customer trust.

AI logos often contain many colours, gradients, and shading that pose a problems with deployment digitally and physically. Designing things like social media posts with 3-5 colours is straight forward. Designing things with a palette of 24 colours is much harder. A large colour palette also poses problems when you want to make SWAG. Any company that deals with colours as individual layers like screen printers (t-shirts), embroidery (hats, shirts), and even in some printing scenarios (off set printing) charge by the colour and if you have 24 colours, it’s going to get super expensive or impossible to replicate your logo.

Fonts: I’ve also noticed that many AI generated logos aren’t choosing fonts and adding text, they are drawing letters instead. This is problematic when you try to use the same font on your website or product label. You’ll spend too much time trying to match to a font that doesn’t exist.

Font psychology is also a large part of branding design that AI generated logos seem to skip, instead it draws letters that looks like bland sans-serif fonts that don’t communicate much, a missed opportunity.

Resolution/File type: The file that AI provides when generating a logo is a PNG. This might be ok for digital applications like a social post but it has a limit on how big you can make it before it starts to look pixelated or distorted. You may not be in the market for a billboard but you might be in the market for a trade show display. And if you are trying to create a fun give away (like a pen or water bottle) for your booth, you’ll need a SVG (vector file)— which AI can’t generate (yet). A PNG file also can’t be edited. Sure you can open up Affinity and change the colour of something but there are no layers or curves which severely limits the changes you can make.

Black and white versions: AI generates logos that have many colours and these designs aren’t adaptable into an all black or all white version. Why does this matter? There are many times where having your logo in all black or white comes in handy like the top of your receipt, co-branding, and photo watermarks.

ARTWORK – HOW TO SUPPLY

Custom Branded Workwear & Merchandise has an in house graphic designer for all your design ideas. If you have artwork to submit, please see below for our artwork requirements.

Preferred File Format – Vector

Secondary File Format – Raster (Photo Realistic)

Why Vector Art is Better

Vector art is created using vector illustration software programs, such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw. These programs use points, lines, and shapes to create clean print-ready art, which can be scaled infinitely, without any loss of quality or fidelity. Here is the difference between vector art and the other more common type of computer graphic, raster art.

Raster art files have edges that become distorted when enlarged. These images have hundreds of colors, while vector files have much less. Raster images are photographs and graphic files created in Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or other raster editing programs. They can be used in some specific screen printing applications.

In most cases, artwork for screen printed graphics needs to be in vector format to achieve the best printing results.

Is My Art Vectored?

Often this can be determined by the file type extension, as vector art is created in Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw and commonly saved with specific file extensions for these software programs. The five most common vector file extensions are: .ai, .cdr, .pdf, .eps, and .svg.

Just because a file has one of these formats does not mean it is vector art. Sometimes designers are not familiar with screen printing requirements so they will open raster files in Adobe Illustrator and “re-save” them with a vector file extension. A good example is files copied or saved from the internet, usually in the .jpg format at 72 DPI. These files seldom reproduce correctly. Only original or redrawn native artwork created in vector editing programs is suitable for reproduction.