Nobody should need a design degree to order a sticker. Here is the whole thing in plain English.
Vector beats everything
A vector file stores your artwork as shapes and instructions, not dots. Blow it up to the side of a truck and it stays perfectly sharp, because the machine redraws it at whatever size you ask for.
Vector formats: AI, EPS, PDF, SVG. If your designer sent you one of these, send us that file, not the JPG preview they also sent.
Raster is fine if it is big enough
A photo or a scan is raster — a grid of coloured dots. It has a fixed number of dots, and stretching it just makes each dot bigger. That is why a logo pulled off a website looks like a mosaic at 3ft wide.
Formats: PNG, JPG, TIFF, PSD. A PNG with a transparent background is genuinely useful for stickers, because we can see exactly where you want the cut.
The quick DPI test
Print quality is measured in dots per inch at final size. Aim for 150 DPI at the size it will actually be printed. Large-format work viewed from a distance can go lower; a small label needs more.
Rough arithmetic: divide your image’s pixel width by the finished width in inches.
- A 3000px wide image on a 20″ sticker = 150 DPI. Good.
- The same 3000px image on a 4ft (48″) banner = 62 DPI. Soft, but a banner is read from far away, so often acceptable.
- A 600px logo from a website on anything = no. Ask whoever made the logo for the vector.
Four things worth knowing
Bleed. Extend your background about an eighth of an inch past every edge. Trimming has a tolerance, and bleed means a stray millimetre shows more background instead of a white sliver.
Outline your fonts, or send the font file with the artwork. Otherwise our machine substitutes something else and your careful layout shifts.
Colour will shift a little. Screens emit light, ink reflects it, and no print matches a backlit screen exactly. If a specific colour is critical — a brand red, a team colour — give us the Pantone or CMYK values and say so up front.
Screenshots are not artwork. A screenshot of a logo is a low-resolution copy of a copy. So is anything pulled out of a Word document or saved from a social media post.
No artwork at all? That is normal
Plenty of jobs start with a sentence and a photo. Describe the idea, tell us where it is going, and our team draws it up free with your quote — including a mock-up on a photo of your actual van, window or shirt. You approve the proof before a single inch of vinyl is cut.
And if what you send is too low-res to print sharp, we will tell you before we print it, not after.
Print & cut stickers and labels are $12 per square foot, any shape, any size, with a $20 minimum order. Work out your price or send the file over and we will check it for free.