Your signwriter asked for a vector. Here’s what he meant.

You sent the sign shop your logo. He asked for a vector. You sent the bigger version off your website. He asked again.

He isn’t being difficult and he isn’t padding the job. He needs a different kind of file, and the one you sent can’t become one without somebody redrawing it by hand.

A picture of your logo, or the instructions for drawing it

A JPEG or a PNG is a grid of coloured squares. Somebody decided how many squares wide it would be, and that decision is baked in forever. Blow it up to 900mm on a ute door and you get the same squares, bigger. That’s the fuzzy edge you’re looking at.

A vector has no squares in it. It’s a set of instructions. Start here. Curve to there. Fill this shape with this colour. The machine works out the pixels itself, at whatever size it’s asked for. A business card and a tailgate come off the same file and both are clean.

Why the sign shop can’t work from the picture

Cut vinyl isn’t printed. It’s cut. A blade follows a line, and a line is exactly what a photo of your logo doesn’t contain. The plotter has nothing to follow.

Shirts are the same problem in different clothes. Screen printing burns one screen per colour, so the artwork has to come apart cleanly. Embroidery is a stitch path, which is a line as well. Those machines need edges, and a grid of squares only has an approximation of one.

2 tests on the file you’ve already got

Run these on whatever is sitting on your desktop. Neither needs software you don’t have.

Test 1: drag it into your browser and zoom (works for SVG, PDF, PNG and JPG). Drag the file onto an open browser tab. Hold Ctrl (Cmd on a Mac) and press + until the logo is huge. A vector stays crisp no matter how far you push it. A raster turns into visible blocks somewhere between 400% and 800%, and once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it.

Test 2: open it in a plain text editor. Right-click, Open with, Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on a Mac. You’re not editing anything, you’re looking at the first line.

• A genuine SVG is readable text. You’ll see <svg near the top and words like path and fill below it.
• An EPS opens with %!PS-Adobe on the first line.
• A PDF opens with %PDF- on the first line.
• A JPEG or PNG that somebody renamed shows a screen of nonsense with JFIF or PNG visible in the first few characters. The extension was changed. The file wasn’t.

That second test is worth remembering, because a file called logo.eps is not automatically an EPS. Renaming is free.

The files worth knowing by name

File	What it actually is	Who asks for it
SVG	Vector, written as text. The web’s version of a vector.	Your website. Sometimes a sign shop.
EPS	Vector, the old print standard. Opens on nearly anything in a workshop.	Signwriters, screen printers, anyone with a plotter.
PDF, type outlined	Vector inside a wrapper everyone can open.	The universal fallback. Send it when in doubt.
AI, CDR, the working file	The editable original, in the program it was drawn in.	The next designer. You should hold a copy regardless.
PNG	Raster, but supports a transparent background.	Anything on a screen where you need no white box.
JPG	Raster, always on a solid background.	Upload forms that reject everything else.

One more worth knowing: WEBP. It’s a web format your site may be using, and most print shops can’t open it.

Outlined type, and why he asks about fonts

Your business name is set in a typeface. In a working file those letters are still live text, so the file relies on that font being installed on whatever machine opens it.

It won’t be installed on the plotter in a shed at 6am. The bad version of what happens next is the quiet one: the software swaps in another font, nothing warns anybody, and the job runs. You find out when the vinyl arrives.

Outlining fixes it permanently. The letters get converted into shapes, so the file needs no font at all. It isn’t text any more. It’s a drawing of text.

There’s a quick way to check a PDF for it. Open it and try to drag-select across the letters with your cursor. If you can highlight them, the type is still live. If nothing highlights, it’s outlined and safe to send.

The trade-off is that outlined type can’t be edited. Which is exactly why you keep the working file with live text as well, and only ever send the outlined one out.

The trap: a vector wrapper with a photo inside

This is the one that catches people who did everything right. You can put a JPEG inside an EPS or a PDF. The file is technically a vector file. What’s inside it is still a grid of squares.

It looks legitimate. The extension is right, it opens in the right programs, the sign shop accepts it. Then the panel comes back soft.

Two tells. The zoom test still catches it, because the artwork inside goes blocky even though the wrapper doesn’t. And the file size is loud: a real vector logo is usually tens of kilobytes, occasionally a couple of hundred. A 6MB EPS of a simple mark has a photograph in it.

What a trace actually costs you

If no vector exists, a sign shop will usually offer to trace it. That means somebody draws over the top of your JPEG by hand, or runs an auto-trace and then cleans up what it gets wrong.

It’s real work and it goes on the invoice. The cost you don’t see is accuracy. A trace is a copy of a copy. Curves get reinterpreted, the corner of the R comes back a fraction off, the gap between 2 letters closes up by a hair. On a business card nobody notices. At 900mm you do, every time you walk past the ute.

And the traced file usually lives at the sign shop rather than with you. The shirt mob makes a different trace off a different JPEG. Now you own 2 versions of your logo that don’t match, and neither is the original.

Which file to send, without thinking about it

• Signwriter, vehicle wrap, shirt printer, anyone manufacturing something: EPS, or a PDF with the type outlined.
• Your website: SVG for the logo itself, PNG for anything that has to sit on a photo.
• Social profiles and email signatures: PNG with a transparent background.
• A form that rejects everything: JPG on white.
• Never send: a screenshot, a photo of the ute, or a logo pulled off your own Facebook page. All 3 have been compressed at least twice.

If you can’t put your hands on any of these and the only copy you own is on the ute, that’s a recovery job rather than a format problem. Getting the originals back off whoever made them is the first thing to try.

Run the zoom test on what you’ve got tonight. It takes 30 seconds and it settles the question the sign shop has been asking you.