Vectors, Logos and Things That Get Printed
Draw curves that hold at any size, then hand a press a file it will not send back.
- Level
- Nothing assumed
- Lessons
- 73
- Reading time
- 623 min
- Price
- Free, no sign-up to read
Vector drawing and the print pipeline, taught with the tools shops actually run. Bezier handles and why fewer anchor points make better curves, building marks from primitives and booleans, outlining type and why the printer asks, designing a logo that survives 16 pixels and one colour, moving files between CorelDRAW, Illustrator, Inkscape and Affinity, styles and master pages for long documents, and CMYK, bleed, overprint and PDF/X for the handover — plus vinyl, embroidery, laser and screen separations.
Opens after the Editing an Image exam
Sign in, finish that course, and pass its exam. You can read this syllabus meanwhile.
Go to Editing an ImageModule 1
The thing that is actually in the file
Before any drawing, the raw material. What a vector file stores, in what units, and how a renderer turns it back into something you can see. Path data read by hand, the coordinate system and the two different "dots per inch" that fight each other, strokes that are instructions rather than shapes, winding rules, clipping, and the places where vector artwork quietly becomes pixels without telling you.
By the end you can
Read the geometry inside a vector file by hand, predict which operations are lossless and which silently rasterise, explain a size or line-weight discrepancy by naming the unit or rendering rule that caused it, and choose vector or raster for a job from its output device rather than from habit.
- 1Why your Photoshop logo cannot go on a hoardingA raster file records pixels at one fixed size; a vector file records geometry with no size at all, which is why only the second can be redrawn for a hoarding.
- 2What the `d` attribute is sayingAn SVG is text you can read and edit, and the `d` attribute is a short list of pen instructions in document coordinates — which is why a 240-byte logo and a 1.9 MB logo can look identical on screen.
- 3Points, millimetres, and two different inchesA vector file stores unitless numbers plus a rule for how many of them make an inch — and because PostScript says 72 and the web says 96, a file that does not state its units can open at the wrong size in perfectly working software.
- 4A path has no thicknessA stroke is a render-time instruction, not an object, so its caps, joins, miter limit and scaling behaviour can change the printed shape — and a "hairline" means whatever the output device's thinnest line is, which on a platesetter is thin enough to disappear.
- 5Why the hole will not appearA shape with more than one loop needs a rule for what counts as inside: non-zero winding depends on the direction each subpath is drawn, even-odd only on how many crossings there are, and the same geometry prints differently under each.
- 6Clipping hides; it does not removeA clipping path hides geometry rather than deleting it, so hidden image data still bloats the file, still costs RIP time, and can still be recovered by anyone who opens the PDF.
- 7Where vector quietly becomes pixelsShadows, blurs, meshes and blend modes are generated as pixels at a resolution the document sets — often 72 ppi by default — and anything transparent gets sliced into atomic regions when flattened, which is where the grey box and the hairline seam come from.
- 8What auto-trace is doing, and when to redraw insteadAuto-trace thresholds, finds contours on a pixel staircase, guesses which steps are corners and fits curves within a tolerance — so wobbly straights, rounded corners and node explosions are all predictable consequences, and anything being enlarged or cut should be redrawn over the trace rather than shipped as one.
Module 2
Drawing curves people will pay for
The manual craft. The four gestures of the pen tool, what makes a join kink, how booleans multiply nodes and how to clean up after them, offsets and the miter spike, transforms as arithmetic rather than dragging, and the grid and snapping setup that helps instead of fighting you. Ends with the workflow for redrawing something that exists only as a photograph.
By the end you can
Draw, correct and combine any shape with the pen, node, boolean, offset and transform tools, name the node type, handle or continuity failure responsible when a curve goes lumpy, and rebuild an existing mark from a photograph or scan as exact geometry rather than as an approximation.
- 9Your curves are lumpy because you used too many pointsPut anchor points only at a curve's extremes — top, bottom, left, right — and fix problems by adjusting handle length, never by adding another point.
- 10Most good logos are circles and rectangles cut into each otherAssemble marks from exact primitives and cut them with booleans, duplicate before every boolean because it is destructive, and remember a hole that fills solid is a fill-rule problem, not a stacking one.
- 11The pen tool is four gesturesThe pen tool has exactly four gestures — click, click-drag, Alt-drag to break the handle pair, and click-to-close — and the one that goes wrong is dragging towards the bend instead of along the direction of travel.
- 12The kink you can see but cannot findVector editors enforce matching tangents but never matching curvature, so a join can be perfectly "smooth" and still show a visible crease — usually caused by mismatched handle lengths, a curve meeting a straight, or an anchor that is not quite at the extreme.
- 13Booleans, and the mess they leave behindA boolean splits paths at every intersection and restitches the survivors, so it adds nodes, hands the result a fill you did not choose, and destroys the inputs — clean up immediately, set colour afterwards, and keep a locked copy of the sources.
- 14Offsets, and the spike that appears at a sharp cornerAn offset runs parallel to the original, so a mitred corner at angle θ lands at `offset ÷ sin(θ/2)` from the point — 5 mm becomes 29 mm at a 20° tip — which is why join style and miter limit exist and why round joins are the safe default.
- 15Transforms are arithmetic, so type the numbersEvery transform is a matrix multiply about an origin you can move, so type the numbers rather than dragging — rotate once by the total instead of repeatedly, and know whether you want the group transformed or each object transformed about its own centre.
- 16Grids and snapping that help instead of fightingSnapping fights you because it is set to every target at once — keep node-to-node and grid, kill bounding-box snapping because a bounding box includes stroke width — and set the grid from the job's real module rather than from the software default.
- 17Rebuilding a mark that only exists as a photographReconstructing a logo from a photograph is measurement, not tracing: correct the perspective, lock a dimmed template, identify the typeface and the underlying primitives, redraw with shape tools, then verify with an overlay, a flip and a 16-pixel test.
Module 3
Type, which is also vector
Letters are paths in somebody else's file, delivered under a licence, shaped by an engine you did not write. What is inside a font, what your licence actually permits, how to kern a wordmark by hand, how to set a paragraph that reads, how type behaves on a curve, why Devanagari and other complex scripts break in ways Latin never does, and what a variable font does to a press.
By the end you can
Set, space and convert type in a vector file without breaking it — choose a typeface you are licensed to use for the job in hand, correct spacing at the pair and the paragraph level, handle a complex script correctly, and decide per job whether to outline, embed or subset, stating the consequence of each to the printer.
- 18Why the printer asked you to outline the fontsOutline text so a missing font cannot reflow your layout, but keep an editable master and embed rather than outline for body text, because thousands of glyph paths choke a RIP.
- 19What is actually inside a font fileA font is a set of tables — outlines, a character map, widths, kerning, substitutions and a permission bit — and `pdffonts` plus `fonttools` will tell you in seconds what a font menu never will.
- 20The licence, which is the part that bitesDesktop, web, app and broadcast are licensed separately; "free for personal use" excludes client work; outlining is not a licensing workaround; and sending a printer the font file is distributing software, which is a different permission from using it.
- 21Kerning a wordmark by handKern by equalising the white *area* between letters, judged three letters at a time and confirmed by blurring — and kern a reversed wordmark separately, because light on dark closes the counters and reads tighter.
- 22Setting a paragraph somebody can readSize, leading and measure carry most of readability — 45 to 75 characters a line, leading at 120 to 145% — and justified text needs a long measure plus controlled H&J values or it develops rivers.
- 23Type on a curve, and why it splaysType on a path is positioned by arc length along the baseline while the glyph is rigid, so letters splay on the outside of a curve and crowd on the inside — fixed by a larger radius, more tracking, and a second reversed circle for the bottom of a badge.
- 24Devanagari, Arabic, and the scripts that breakComplex scripts need a shaping engine that forms conjuncts and reorders matras, so the same text can be correct on screen and wrong in the PDF — test with a real string of hard cases, have a native reader check it before outlining, and never use legacy non-Unicode fonts.
- 25Figures, dashes and the characters nobody checksQuotes, the three dashes, tabular versus proportional figures, the rupee sign's patchy coverage and silent font substitution are the details that separate set type from typed text — and each has a specific check you can run in seconds.
- 26Variable fonts, and what a press does with oneA variable font is instanced — frozen at your axis values and embedded as an ordinary static font — before it reaches a press, so it is safe for print if you verify the export, and its `wdth` axis is the only legitimate way to condense a headline.
Module 4
Colour that survives the press
Why a screen and a sheet of paper disagree, and what to do about it. Device-independent colour and Delta E, ICC profiles and the difference between assigning and converting, gamut and rendering intents, halftone screening and dot gain, spot inks and the economics of a plate, designing in one and two colours, trapping, and how to proof without a budget.
By the end you can
Specify a colour so the sheet that comes off the press matches what was agreed — choose between process, spot and duotone, read a gamut warning and pick a rendering intent, allow for dot gain and trapping, and state which of screen, proof and press you are trusting and why.
- 27Two different physical processesScreens add emitted light and paper subtracts reflected light, so white is the paper and black is limited by it — and because two different spectra can match under one illuminant and differ under another, print is judged under a standard D50 light rather than under whatever bulb is overhead.
- 28Lab, Delta E, and what "close enough" meansLab describes colour by measurement rather than by device, Delta E measures the distance between two colours in it, and a specification that names a ΔE figure and a formula is something a printer can act on where "match it exactly" is not.
- 29Profiles, and the dialog that decides everythingAssign changes what the existing numbers mean; convert changes the numbers to preserve the appearance — and a CMYK conversion is only as correct as the press profile you converted to, which is a question for your printer rather than a default.
- 30What happens to a colour the press cannot printPerceptual compresses the whole gamut smoothly and suits photographs; relative colorimetric with black point compensation keeps in-gamut colours exact and clips the rest, which is what artwork and brand colours need.
- 31Why your 20% tint printed at 30%Tone is made of dots, and a dot grows when it hits paper — around 15% on coated and 25% on uncoated at the midtone — which the press profile already corrects for, so the failures come from converting with the wrong profile or from relying on very light tints and small reversed type.
- 32A spot colour is a plate, and a plate is moneyA spot colour is a physically mixed ink on its own plate, which buys consistency, out-of-gamut reach and economy on low colour counts at the cost of a plate — and a spot must be defined as a spot swatch and then verified in the separations, because a spot that exports as process is a silent failure.
- 33Getting a whole design out of two inksOne plate gives five usable values including the reversed paper, and two inks give tints of each plus overprints — which is enough range for real work, provided the colour count is decided before the design is drawn rather than after.
- 34Trapping, and the white line around everythingRegistration drifts by a tenth of a millimetre or so, exposing white slivers where two knocked-out colours meet — so the lighter colour is spread into the darker by around 0.1 mm, usually by the printer's RIP rather than by you, while 100% black text overprints and white must never overprint.
- 35Proofing when you cannot afford a proofing systemA soft proof shows which colours are unreachable, a calibrated digital proof predicts the sheet, and the first good sheet off the press is the only thing that shows the real ink on the real paper — so approve under a known light, against a physical reference, and keep the signed artefact.
Module 5
Designing a mark
The whole job of a logo, from the questions you ask before drawing to the folder you hand over. Mark types and what each costs to draw and to defend, sketching and narrowing, real construction versus the golden-ratio story, lockups and clear space, hostile backgrounds, the law around naming and ownership stated honestly, presenting work, and the delivery pack that stops the client's next supplier redrawing it in Word.
By the end you can
Take a logo from brief to delivered asset pack — interrogate the brief against the surfaces it will appear on, choose and draw a mark that holds in one colour at 16 pixels and on a hostile background, define its lockups and clear space, and hand over files plus a usage sheet a stranger can work from.
- 36If it does not work in black at 16 pixels, it is not a logoDesign the mark in flat black at small size first, because embroidery, stamps, vinyl and one-colour print cannot reproduce anything else, and the colour version can be added afterwards.
- 37The questions to ask before you draw anythingThe surfaces list — every specific place the mark will appear — decides more of a logo's design than any adjective the client uses, so collect it first, convert vague directions into choices between real examples, and send a one-page written brief back for confirmation.
- 38Five kinds of mark, and what each one costsWordmarks read immediately and fail small, monograms work small and are hard to make distinctive, pictorial marks cross languages and cost iterations, abstract marks are ownable but carry no meaning until somebody pays to build it — and a combination mark is the honest default for most small clients.
- 39Thumbnails, and why you never show a concept you would not shipGenerate thirty thumbnails at 30 mm on paper before opening any software, develop six into real geometry, and present exactly three you would all be happy to ship — with rationale about function rather than story, because a functional reason cannot be argued with.
- 40Real construction, and the golden-ratio storyReal construction means one stroke unit, shared radii, aligned terminals and a grid of multiples, corrected optically by eye — and the golden-ratio circles laid over famous logos are almost always retrofitted decoration rather than how those marks were drawn.
- 41Lockups, clear space and the smallest it may ever beDefine separate lockups rather than letting somebody scale one to fit, express internal spacing and clear space as multiples of an internal measure so they stay true at any size, and arrive at minimum sizes empirically by printing on the worst printer available.
- 42Reversed, on a photograph, and in one threadA knockout is transparent geometry rather than an inverted image, and a reversed mark may need its counters opened because light on dark closes them optically and ink closes them physically — so deliver designed versions for dark, photographic, single-thread and colourless surfaces rather than leaving them to be improvised.
- 43Names, trademarks and who owns the fileCopyright protects the drawing and a trademark protects the sign used in trade; ownership of commissioned artwork varies by country and must be settled in writing; and nobody can promise an enforceable copyright in generated output, so the client's real protection is registration and use.
- 44The folder you hand overHand over a numbered folder with print, screen, source and usage material plus a plain-text README that tells a printer, a developer and an embroiderer which file each of them needs — and include a Lab value, because it is the only colour notation that means the same thing at two different suppliers.
Module 6
Documents that survive a late change
Multi-page work, where the difference between a tool and a toy is what happens when the client changes their mind on page 60. Choosing a layout application honestly, deriving a grid from the type rather than a template, masters and sections, threaded text and overset, linked images and effective resolution, tables that behave like tables, automatic contents and cross-references, data merge for five hundred cards, and how a book is actually bound.
By the end you can
Build a multi-page document that survives a late change — masters, a style family, a grid derived from the body text, linked images at verified effective resolution, an automatic contents list and a data merge — and specify a bound job with the right page count, spine width and gutter allowance.
- 45Eighty pages, one font change, six hours of your lifeStyles exist so a change is made once in a named place rather than eighty times by hand, and a style that does not update is almost always carrying a local override.
- 46Choosing a layout tool, honestlyChoose the layout tool from the document's requirements — press colour and bleed, structural features like contents and cross-references, and budget — and accept that Scribus is a genuine free answer for press work rather than a consolation prize.
- 47Deriving a grid from the type, not from a templateDerive the grid from the body text — size and leading first, then a measure of 45 to 75 characters, then columns, and the margins are what remains — and add the binding's gutter allowance to the inner margin before anything else is placed.
- 48Masters, running heads and why folios driftPut all repeating furniture on masters, number pages with a marker rather than by typing, use sections for front matter, and when a folio drifts the cause is almost always a local override on that page rather than a problem with the master.
- 49Threaded text, overset, and copy that does not fitThreaded frames let text reflow through a document, and overset text is the silent failure that hides surplus copy where no proof will show it — so check the preflight for overset before every export, and fit copy by editing it or by changing a style rather than by distorting type.
- 50Linked images, and the number that actually mattersEffective PPI — native pixels divided by the placed physical size — is the only resolution figure that means anything, a stored dpi tag is just a note about intended size, and packaging exists because a linked file that was not sent is the commonest reason a job cannot be opened.
- 51Tables, and why tabs are not oneA real table object supports repeating headers, cell styles, alternating fills and central restyling where tabbed text supports none of them — and a table is made readable by removing rules and adding space rather than by boxing every cell.
- 52Contents lists and cross-references that renumber themselvesGenerated contents lists, cross-references, numbered captions and running heads all derive from paragraph styles and update when pages move — so anything that refers to a position in the document should be generated rather than typed, including the leader dots.
- 53Five hundred different cards from one templateVariable data printing is a template plus a clean UTF-8 CSV, and nearly every failure is a data problem — so design to the longest record, generate QR and barcode images beforehand as a merged image field, and proof by sampling six deliberately chosen records rather than skimming all of them.
- 54Page counts, creep and the spineFolded work comes in multiples of four and often of sixteen, creep pushes the inner pages of a thick saddle-stitched booklet outward by several millimetres, and a perfect-bound cover cannot be laid out until the printer gives you the spine width measured on the actual stock.
Module 7
The handover
Everything between "the design is finished" and "the job is on press". What a RIP does with your file, which PDF/X flavour forbids what, the five rectangles inside a PDF, how to preflight your own export with free command-line tools, how to read separations, what to ask about paper and finishing, and how to run a proof approval so that a dispute has an answer.
By the end you can
Export a file a press will run without a phone call — bleed and boxes correct, the right PDF/X flavour, fonts and images accounted for — and verify every one of those claims from the exported PDF itself using free tools, then specify the stock and finishing and record the approval.
- 55The blue you chose on screen cannot be printedChoose colours from a printed chart rather than a screen, keep small black text at 100K only, and run overprint preview before every export because a white object set to overprint vanishes entirely.
- 56What a RIP actually does with your fileA RIP interprets, flattens, colour-converts and screens, and each stage has its own characteristic failure — so a job that times out is almost always node explosion, nested transparency, oversized clipped images or too many clipping paths, and none of it is visible in a screen view of the PDF.
- 57PDF/X, and what each flavour forbidsEvery PDF/X flavour embeds fonts, defines a TrimBox and names an output intent, and they differ in what they allow: X-1a forbids RGB and flattens transparency, X-4 keeps transparency live for the RIP to flatten once at device resolution.
- 58The five rectangles inside a PDFThe press cuts from the TrimBox, so set the document page size to trim and bleed in the document setup rather than exporting a page at trim-plus-bleed — and verify with `pdfinfo -box`, which is arithmetic anybody can check in ten seconds.
- 59Preflighting your own PDF, freeRun seven checks against the exported PDF rather than the design file — boxes, fonts, image ppi, ink coverage, separations, overprint simulation and structure — all of which poppler-utils and Ghostscript do for nothing, and none of which will catch a misspelled name.
- 60Reading separations, and the fifth plate you did not orderSeparations answer questions a composite cannot: whether your black text is really 100% K, whether a spot survived as a spot, whether there is an unordered fifth plate, and whether total ink exceeds what the press can dry.
- 61Paper, and everything done after printingWeight is not thickness, coated and uncoated differ in gamut and dot gain by a wide margin, grain direction decides whether a fold cracks, and every finishing process — varnish, foil, emboss, die-cut — is supplied the same way: its own layer, a named spot swatch, set to overprint.
- 62Approvals, and who pays for the reprintKeep four artefacts on every job — the exact PDF with a checksum, the message that sent it, the signed proof and the preflight output — because a reprint dispute is only answerable by whichever party can show what was actually supplied and approved.
- 63CDR is the most common file in Indian print and the least portableKeep your working file native, send a press-ready PDF by default, and ask the shop which software, version and PDF/X standard they want before you start rather than after you finish.
- 64The covering note, and the file a shop can openA nine-line covering note in ordinary words answers everything a shop would otherwise email about and doubles as your record of the specification — and the final look is run on the exported PDF as though a stranger had sent it.
Module 8
Machines that cut, stitch and burn
The paid work almost nobody teaches. Preparing a file for a physical machine rather than for a sheet of paper: vinyl plotters and weeding, print-and-cut registration, embroidery stitch files, laser kerf and material safety, CNC tool radius, screen-printing separations and underbase, the newer garment processes, and large-format signage at real viewing distances.
By the end you can
Prepare a vector file for a plotter, needle, laser, router, screen or large-format printer — stating the minimum feature the material can hold, the kerf, pull or choke the process introduces, and the file format, layer convention and spot-colour name the operator's software expects.
- 65The paid vector work is mostly machines, not postersFor any machine — plotter, needle, laser, screen — the file must describe a physical action, which means closed paths, outlined strokes, welded overlaps and a minimum feature size the material can actually hold.
- 66A vinyl job from file to wallA plotter cuts outlines, so text must be curves, strokes must be outlined and overlaps welded — and the real constraint is weeding, which sets a minimum feature of about 2 mm and makes every counter a separate piece held only by the transfer tape.
- 67Print and cut, and the marks the machine looks forPrint-and-cut aligns the two machines with optical registration marks the RIP places, and the cut line travels as an outline on a named spot colour such as `CutContour`, set to overprint so it is passed to the cutter rather than printed.
- 68Embroidery, which does not use vectors at allEmbroidery reads a stitch file, not vectors, so a digitiser must choose stitch type, direction, density and underlay — and pull compensation means a shape comes out narrower across the stitch direction and longer along it unless the artwork is deliberately widened.
- 69Laser cutting, kerf, and the material you must never useA laser distinguishes cut from engrave by stroke and colour on named layers, removes a kerf of 0.1–0.3 mm that must be measured on the real material before parts will fit, and must never be used on PVC or any other chlorine-bearing plastic.
- 70CNC routing, tool radius, and the letters on a shop boardA router bit of finite diameter cannot cut an internal corner sharper than its own radius, so ask the bit diameter before drawing and add dog-bone fillets where a square corner is needed — and built-up or channel letters impose a minimum stroke width and make every counter a separate piece.
- 71Screen printing, separations and the underbaseScreen printing is one screen per colour, so build in flat colours on named layers, and on dark fabric add a white underbase choked inwards by 0.3–0.5 mm — with traps around 0.5 mm because manual carousel registration is measured in millimetres, not tenths.
- 72DTF, DTG, sublimation and heat transferDTG is cotton-only with a machine-printed underbase, DTF works on almost anything but sits on the surface and needs clean hard-edged transparency, sublimation bonds into polyester and cannot print white or work on dark, and HTV is cut mirrored in flat colours.
- 73Signage, viewing distance and the seamsLarge-format resolution is set by viewing distance — 20 to 40 ppi at full size for a hoarding seen from 30 m — and the constraints that actually decide the design are where the panel seams fall, the hem and eyelet allowance, and cap height of about 25 mm per 3 m of viewing distance.