The short answer
Send a vector file — AI, EPS, PDF or SVG — with the fonts converted to outlines. If you do not have one, send the largest, cleanest PNG you own with a transparent background. If you only have a logo lifted from your website, say so, and we will tell you honestly whether it is usable.
That covers 90% of cases. The rest of this explains why, so you can judge your own files rather than guessing.
Vector versus raster, in one paragraph
A raster file — JPG, PNG, GIF — is a grid of pixels. Enlarge it and you are inventing pixels that were never there, which is why blown-up logos look soft or blocky. A vector file is a set of mathematical instructions for drawing shapes. It can be scaled to a shopfront or down to a sleeve badge with identical crispness. For anything printed at physical size, vector wins.
Your designer will have supplied vector files at some point. They are often in an email from three years ago rather than on the shared drive. It is worth ten minutes of searching before you resign yourself to a website PNG.
What DPI actually needs to be
If vector is genuinely unavailable, raster can work — at the right resolution. The standard is 300 DPI at the printed size, and that last part is where people go wrong. A 300 DPI file is meaningless as a number on its own. What matters is pixel dimensions relative to the print.
For a left-chest print at roughly 9cm wide, you want around 1,050 pixels across. For a full A3-ish back print at 30cm, around 3,500 pixels. A logo saved off a website is typically 300–600 pixels wide, which is fine for a small chest badge and visibly soft anywhere larger.
Transparency, and the white box problem
JPG cannot store transparency. Save a logo as JPG and every transparent area becomes white — which on a navy shirt prints as a white rectangle around your logo. It is the single most common file problem we see.
PNG supports transparency. So do all the vector formats. If you are sending raster, send PNG, and open it against a dark background first to check the background is genuinely transparent rather than white.
Colour: RGB, CMYK and why we may ask for a Pantone
Screens work in RGB, which can produce colours that no printer can reproduce — bright greens and vivid oranges especially. DTF printing gets impressively close to screen colour, considerably closer than screen printing does, but "close" is not "identical".
If your brand has a Pantone reference, send it. It lets us match deliberately rather than approximately. Without one, we match to what we see on the file, and small shifts are possible. For embroidery, colour is chosen from a physical thread chart — a different exercise entirely, covered in our guide on why some logos do not embroider well.
Fonts — the thing that breaks silently
If you send a vector file with live text and we do not have the font installed, it substitutes something else, and it usually does so without complaining. Your logo then goes to print in Arial and nobody notices until the box arrives.
Convert text to outlines, paths or curves before sending. Every design application has this command. It turns the letters into shapes and removes the dependency entirely.
What we will do rather than take your money
Here is the part worth knowing. If you send us a file that is not good enough, we will tell you before we print, not after. A soft logo enlarged to a back print is our problem to flag, not your problem to discover on delivery.
We can often redraw a poor logo as clean vector for a modest one-off charge, and you keep the file afterwards for every future supplier. That is a better outcome than us printing a blurry file and both of us pretending it looked like that on screen. And if your logo is fine as it is, we will tell you that too rather than upselling a redraw you do not need.
Send it and find out
The quickest way to check a file is to let someone look at it. Send whatever you have through the free mock-up form — we will come back with your logo on the actual garment, plus a straight answer on whether the file is print-ready at the size you want. Ready to price it up? Request a quote, or browse the corporate teamwear range to see what your logo will be going on.
