The single most common hold-up on a personalised order is the logo file. Not the design, not the sizes — the file.
It is nobody's fault. Most clubs have one good copy of their crest somewhere, made years ago by somebody who has since left, and what gets sent to us is whatever was easiest to find. This is a five-minute guide to sending the right thing.
The one-line answer
Send a vector file if you possibly can: .ai, .eps, .pdf or .svg. A vector is drawn with maths rather than pixels, so it is equally sharp on a 40mm chest badge and a 300mm back print. It never needs resizing and it never goes fuzzy.
If you cannot, send the largest, sharpest image you have — a PNG with a transparent background is ideal.
Why the badge off your website will not do
This is the part that surprises people, so here is the arithmetic.
A crest on a website is typically about 200 pixels across, because that is all a web page needs. Print wants around 300 pixels per inch. 200 pixels at 300dpi is 17mm wide — about the size of a 5p piece.
Stretch that same file across a 194mm chest and you are printing at roughly 26dpi. It looks perfectly fine on your screen at 200 pixels. It comes off the press as a blurry, stair-stepped mess, and the first anyone usually knows about it is when the box arrives.
So we check it for you. Upload a logo in the designer and the site works out the resolution it will actually print at, at the size you have chosen, and warns you on the page if it is too low. Before you order, not after.
A checklist
-
Vector if possible —
.ai,.eps,.pdf,.svg. - Transparent background if it is a PNG. A logo on a white square prints as a white square, which is very obvious on a navy shirt.
- No drop shadows or glows baked into the file. They do not reproduce, and on embroidery they cannot.
- Trim the whitespace. If there is a big margin round the design, the artwork gets scaled to fit the margin and prints smaller than you expected.
- Tell us the exact colours if they matter — a Pantone reference, or at minimum the hex codes. "Club blue" covers a lot of ground.
- Check you are allowed to use it. League badges, sponsor marks and anything with a governing body's logo in it usually need permission.
If all you have is a bad file
Send it anyway. A crest can usually be redrawn as a clean vector from a reasonable image, and once it is done you own a file that will work on everything forever — kit, training wear, bags, banners, the lot. Most clubs only need this done once.
Email what you have to sales@eastpointsports.net and we will tell you whether it is usable as it stands.
Sizing it sensibly
A chest badge is usually 60–90mm wide; a cap or beanie front is smaller again; a back print can run to 250mm or more. Rather than guess, the designer tells you the exact printed width in millimetres and draws the printable area on the garment, so you can see how much room you have before you decide.
Bear in mind that a logo which works at 250mm may not survive being shrunk to 50mm — fine detail disappears. If your crest has small lettering round the edge, it is worth having a simplified version for small placements.
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