Getting your logo to print sharp

Resolution is not a property of your file — it is a property of your file at the size you print it. The same logo is razor sharp on a one-inch mark and mushy blown up to four. What counts is pixels per printed inch:

The practical fix: send the largest original you have. A logo exported at 300 px wide cannot be rescued by enlarging it — the detail was never captured. We do upscale raster uploads for the print file, but upscaling smooths an image, it cannot invent detail that was never there, so our meter judges your original pixels and stays honest with you.

An SVG (or a vector PDF) has no resolution at all — it is drawn from maths, so it is sharp at any size. If whoever made your logo can send the vector original, use it and stop worrying about DPI entirely.

• SVG — best. Sharp at any size, small file.
• PDF — good. We use the first page, rendered at print resolution.
• PNG — good for raster, and it keeps a transparent background.
• JPG — works, but it cannot hold transparency, so you get a white box around your logo. On kraft that box is very visible.

Whatever you send, trim the background before you upload. A white rectangle behind a logo is the single most common avoidable flaw we see.

Ink spreads slightly into paper fibre. Below roughly 5 ptthat spread closes up the counters — the holes in an “a” or an “e” — and clean type turns into grey mush. The designer will not let you set text smaller than that, and it also measures type inside an uploaded logo, which is where tiny print usually hides: a tagline or a web address that was legible on screen at 400 % zoom.

If your logo has fine print in it, scale the whole logo up rather than accepting it. Small type is the flaw customers notice in the hand, not on screen.

This is the one that catches nearly everyone, and it is worth reading twice. Our press lays down no white ink. Ink is transparent, so it is tinted by the paper rather than sitting on top of it. On kraft, anything white or very light in your artwork simply is not printed, and the brown card shows through instead.

So a white wordmark, a logo with a white knockout, or pale grey line work all vanish on kraft. The designer samples your artwork and warns you when less than 8% of it carries enough ink to register on kraft.

Your options, in order of how well they usually work:

• Send a dark version of your logo — most brands have one.
• Invert it: dark shapes where the white ones were.
• Add the $12.00 design review and we will redraw it to print properly on kraft.

The no-white-ink rule above is the extreme end of something that affects every colour you print on kraft. Ink is transparent and the card is brown, so light passes through the ink, reflects off the brown fibre and comes back tinted. Everything lands darker, warmer and slightly softer than the same colour looked on a backlit white screen.

Deep colours — black, navy, forest, burgundy — survive this well and are what we recommend. Mid-tones warm up a little: a cool grey drifts toward taupe. Pale and pastel shades give the ink the least to work with, so the brown dominates and they read muddy rather than delicate.

There is no setting that fixes this on our end or yours; it is what transparent ink on brown paper does. Design for it instead: pick the darker end of your brand palette, and treat the designer preview as a close approximation of the colour rather than a match.

We would rather flag a file than print a card you are unhappy with. If your artwork is close to a limit, the designer offers a $12.00 design review — a person redraws or cleans up the art before it goes to press. It is optional, and only offered when your file genuinely needs it.

You can also design the whole card in your own software: every card has a downloadable artwork template with the cut shape, holes and safe area marked. Design on it, delete the guides layer, and upload the result. If the guides sneak into your export, we catch that too rather than printing blue lines on your cards.