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Don’t stress, just have a chat to your Apparel Consultant about where you’re at with your artwork, and they can get our in house design team to sort out everything you need.

Fonts aren’t automatically transferred with a vector file when it is created in a program like Adobe Illustrator. When using fonts in the program, the text is linked to a font file located on your computer. If that text is not converted to shapes or outlines or “embedded”, in the program, when you send that file to us if we don’t have the font installed on our computer the font you have used will be substituted for a different font that is installed on our system.

To get around this you need to convert fonts to outlines or embed the fonts. To do this in Adobe Illustrator you can right click on the text and choose “Create Outlines” alternatively if you go to Type>Create Outlines or finally you can use the hotkeys Shift+Ctrl+O. This will convert all you type to shapes and it will transport within your file.

Vector images are made out of lines and shapes. This helps us when we need to separate colours. Each shape that has the same colour is separated from the image. This can’t effectively be done with a bitmap image when printing with spot colours.

One time when it is ok to use bitmap images is when you want a full colour print using process CMYK colours. Sometimes bitmap images are ok for single colour prints as long as they are at least 300dpi and already at print size.

Bitmaps (also called “raster”) are made up of pixels, while vector images are composed of mathematical formulas that consist of curves and points. As such, they can be resized at will without losing quality. Making a bitmap larger makes the pixels larger too and the result can be blurry and jagged. Photos are bitmap images, and so are file formats like bmp, jpg, and psd.

Vector images have crisp lines and can be resized as big as a house without losing any image quality. Vector images are created in programs like Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand and Corel Draw