All About Screen Printing Artwork: Vector VS Non-vector

All About Screen Printing Artwork:  Vector VS Non-vector

Art work for screen printing should always be in vector format (sometimes you can use a very high resolution photoshop image). Vector format is digitally drawn art that uses your original image as a reference. When an image is vectorized properly it can be resized to any size and not lose its image quality. When you zoom in on a jpeg you will notice that the edges get blurry, which makes for a bad film output. When you zoom in on a vector the lines will stay nice and crisp. A tip to remember: how you see your image on a computer screen, is how it will print out. When you zoom in close on your design, if the edges are blurry, pixelated or grainy, that is how it will also look when it’s printed out for screen printing.

Example:

You can see that in the vectorized image the lines are nice and smooth, where as in the unvectorized image, the lines are blurry. Vectorizing is done in either Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW, so if you have either of those programs, you can watch some of the many YouTube videos on how to vectorize images. When an image is properly vectorized it will be in either a pdf, Ai, or corel file format. Jpeg and .PNG file formats are not vector compatible.