What to avoid when you design a file for Embroidery?

There are few common issues our clients face when they send a design file to be embroidered on a hoodie or a sweatshirt, however, the quality of your embroidery orders will suffer. We’ll embroider the graphic as best we can, but the result might not satisfy you  as you should put in consideration the below points

Text issues:

Avoid using very small letters because the embroidered text might not be legible. Keep the text at least 0.25” in height and at least 0.05” thick. The minimum recommended line thickness for the regular satin stitch is 0.05”. For thinner lines we’ll use run stitch (a single line of stitches).

You can measure the text in Illustrator either by using the measuring tool, or by converting the font point size to inches. You can do this by going to:
(File > Preferences > Units > General > Inches)

File Preferences Units General Inches: 0.25” is equivalent to approximately 36pt, and the letters will also have the necessary thickness. But this depends on the font. We recommend using simple fonts like Arial, Helvetica, Myriad pro.

textured graphics:

With distressed or textured graphics many details might be lost during embroidery depending on the texture size. For these files, we’ll only be able to use flat embroidery, and extremely thin parts are likely to be run stitched.

Gradients:

We can only embroider solid shapes and colors. Gradients won’t work because we can’t transition from one color thread to another.
You’ll have to convert gradients to a one color graphic, and split multiple color graphics with gradients into solid colors.

Solid backgrounds:

Graphics that cover a large part of the embroidery area will likely exceed the maximum stitch count of 15,000. Remove all backgrounds from your files to make sure they don’t exceed this count.

If you’d like to keep the background, we’ll have to reduce the size of the graphic by up to 50%. (Results will not be satisfying)

Photographic Images:

It’s not possible to embroider photographic images as they are. Photographic images have to be recreated to include solid shapes and colors.

Side Embroidery ” Caps “:

The area for side embroidery is smaller than in the front. Include up to 10 characters per line in your text to make sure that the final result looks great.