Vector for screen printing: flat-color art your shop can separate

Why your screen printer asked for a vector file

Screen printing uses one screen per ink color, and each screen needs a sharp, solid shape for that color. A PNG saved from a website has soft, blended edges, so someone has to redraw it before the colors can be separated. A vector for screen printing gives the shop flat shapes it can separate directly.

Shops charge roughly $25–75 or more for art prep when they have to rebuild a file. Sending clean, flat-color art, whether it's a vector for a T-shirt run or a tote bag order, can reduce that work, though pricing is always up to the shop.

What a screen printing vector file needs

Reduce your design to its ink colors before uploading

SVGR has no color-count control. It traces the colors it finds, so a three-ink design saved with soft edges can come back with many more. Reduce the image to your ink count before you turn it into a vector for screen printing: posterize it in a photo editor, or fill each area with one flat color.

Soft-edged images also produce near-duplicate colors, such as several almost-black shades along the edges of black shapes. Before you send the file, recolor them to the ink they should be in Illustrator, Inkscape or Affinity. Otherwise your printer sees extra colors that each look like another screen.

Start from the largest, sharpest version of the art you have. A small JPEG adds compression specks that trace as tiny extra shapes.

Spot colors, RGB and the file you send

SVGR outputs SVG and a vector PDF. Both are RGB: they describe screen colors, not Pantone inks. Your printer assigns spot colors when they separate the file, so tell them which inks you want, with Pantone numbers if you have them.

The PDF is a vector PDF your printer can scale, sized to the image, with no bleed and no CMYK. Most printers accept PDF. If yours insists on AI or EPS, open the SVG or PDF in Illustrator or Inkscape and save it in that format; renaming a PNG to .eps only wraps the same pixels.

Traps, the white underbase and halftones are part of separation, which the printer does in their own software. SVGR doesn't add them.

Gradients, holes and other limits

• Keep the art flat. With the Design type and Recognize text off, SVGR traces flat colors, so a gradient in the source comes out as bands of slightly different colors. If your design needs a gradient, ask the shop to halftone it from your original art.
• Holes are shapes on top, not real holes. SVGR stacks shapes, so the inside of an O or a ring is a background-colored shape sitting on top. Transparent background removes only the outer background, so on a dark shirt that inner shape would print as ink. Delete it, or use Path > Difference in Inkscape or Pathfinder in Illustrator to cut a real hole.
• Very fine lines and small text can fill in or drop out on press, however clean the vector is. Ask your printer about minimum line weights.
• Photos and painterly art aren't a good fit. They need halftone separations made from the original image, not a trace.
• Transparent background removes the shape painted in the color found at the image corners, which is what people mean by the background. If your artwork bleeds into all four corners, or the corners are different colors, nothing is removed and the background stays — give the artwork a plain, even margin and convert again. Areas fully enclosed by artwork are never removed, and a PNG that already has a transparency channel is left as it is.
• Curves are traced as many short straight segments. Traced from a small image, they can look slightly angular when enlarged, so start from the largest copy you have.