In today’s high-tech world of desk top publishing it
seems like everyone has become a graphic artist! Right?
Wrong?
As professional custom t-shirt printers
and custom embroidery specialist, we require some
very specific types of files. Listed below are basic
explanations of what our art and production departments
use here at Blue Heron Industries, Inc. and goblueheron.com.
For custom t-shirt printing of basic
logo’s we use Adobe Illustrator for color separation
and layout. This is professional graphic software
and not generally available to home users due to its
complexity and expense. This program allows us to
scale your image up or down without loss of quality.
File produced by Adobe Illustrator are known as vector
files. Many of our customers have great designs created
in programs that cannot be imported into Illustrator
and can only be viewed by us as a .jpeg file. A .jpeg
file is never a usable file for multi-color custom
t-shirt printing. A .jpeg is a stripped down graphic
file of low resolution that cannot be edited effectively
or scaled up or down to meet your custom t-shirt printing
needs. Blue Heron Industries, Inc. has a full art
department capable of recreating any piece of art.
Some of our custom t-shirt printing
customers provide us with files created in programs
such as Paint Pro, Publisher, Word and Power Point.
These programs are not appropriate for custom t-shirt
printing, except as reference for our art department.
Custom embroidery is completely different.
We accept files with the following extensions, .jpeg,
.bmp, .tiff, .gif, .pdf. These files are used as reference
by our embroidery department when setting up your
logo for custom embroidery. Our custom embroidery
customers have much more latitude in the types of
files provided.
Our best advice – when in doubt
–call 800-709-2380!
