Prepare a logo for embroidery

Artwork is not a stitch file

Two different things get called "digitizing". The first is preparing clean vector artwork. The second is generating stitches from it — underlay, stitch angles, pull compensation, density, a machine format like DST, PES or EXP. The second depends on the fabric, the machine and the thread, and no automatic tool does it well without a person.

This guide is about the first. Do it properly and the digitizer spends their time on stitch decisions instead of rebuilding your shapes.

Decide the sewn size before anything else

A design that reads on a jacket back at 120 mm does not read on a cap at 60 mm — and it does not shrink gracefully, because thread has a minimum width and detail below it simply cannot exist.

Fix the size first. Every other decision on this page depends on it: which details survive, how many colours are worth changing thread for, and how much simplification the mark can take.

Closed shapes, no open strokes

A fill stitch fills an interior. An open path has no interior, so a stroked line in your artwork is not something a digitizer can fill — it has to be converted to an outline shape first, and if they do it, they are guessing at your intended weight.

Convert strokes to outlines yourself, in your editor, at the final size. Then every shape in the file is a closed region with a defined boundary.

No stacked fills — this is the big one

Most tracers, by default, produce stacked output: the background region is a full-size shape, and the shapes on top of it are painted over it. On screen this is invisible and efficient. On a machine it means the needle sews the entire background, then sews the artwork on top of it.

The result is a patch with roughly twice the stitches it needs. It is stiff, it puckers the fabric, it takes twice as long, and it wears badly at the edges. It is also easy to avoid: trace in cutout mode, so every region is disjoint and nothing is hidden underneath anything else.

You can check this in any editor. Select the top shape and move it aside. If there is more artwork underneath rather than blank space, the file is stacked.

Cut the palette to threads you will actually change

Every colour in the file is a thread change: a stop, a trim, a re-thread, and a chance to misalign. Four to six colours is normal for a logo. Ten is a conversation with the shop about cost.

Trace to the number you want rather than merging by hand afterwards. A tracer given a four-colour budget makes the merge decisions consistently, region by region; a person doing it by eye at the end makes them one at a time and misses the small shapes.

Also match against a real thread chart. Two brand colours that differ slightly on screen may have one thread between them, and the design is better for it.

Remove what cannot be stitched

Gradients, soft shadows and glows do not exist in thread. They have to become flat colour or disappear, and deciding which is a design decision — better made by you than by a digitizer who has never seen the brand.

The same goes for detail below the minimum stitch width. A hairline rule, a thin serif or a one-pixel highlight will either be dropped or thickened. Raise the speckle filter so those regions never reach the digitizer, and thicken deliberately the ones that matter.

Small text is the usual casualty. Below roughly 5 mm cap height, letters lose their counters and turn into blobs. Set small text again at a heavier weight, or leave it out.

What to hand over

Send vector artwork at the final sewn size, in cutout form, with the palette already reduced and strokes already outlined. SVG or PDF is fine; most digitizing packages read both, and DXF once outlines are all you need.

Include the sewn dimensions in writing, the thread colours you want matched, and the fabric it is going on. Those three things prevent most of the back-and-forth, because all three change the stitch decisions.