Top Tips for Printing Your Logo on Products

A high-quality logo is essential for any company that is looking to establish their own brand. However, not everyone is secretly moonlighting as a digital artist, and navigating the world of color gradients, DPI qualifiers, and line art can be daunting for even the most entrepreneurial of business owners. That’s why we’ve put together this guide to designing the perfect logo with simple tips for printing your logo on products.  

Shout out: Special thanks to our Pens.com artwork expert, Fiona McEvoy, for answering our questions to help create this beginner-friendly guide to logo creation. 

Where Can I Create My Own Logo?

If you don’t have a logo yet, or you have an idea for one but don’t have it created digitally, your first step is finding a beginner-friendly place for creating an image. While most professional designers will use high-end software like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, there are a lot of free and low-cost options available as well. Here are a few options that our experts recommend: 

• Vecteezy – According to our resident expert, this site gives all sorts of free vector and raster images in a high-quality format.
• Looka – This site walks you through the process of creating a logo, offering inspiration for layouts and styles that are easy to implement in a variety of branding situations.
• Canva.com – This site offers both paid and free tiers, with plenty of options in the free tier for creating and resizing images. This includes creating images with a transparent background, perfect for logos.
• MS Paint – Looking for something that allows you to easily free-hand an image without complex layers and vectors? MS Paint is a free app that is great for beginners looking to create simple raster images.

When creating text-based logos, you can also use free sites like Dafont to find the best text type that matches the tone of your branding. Just remember, for printing your company logo onto products, avoid fonts that are too thin or too thick and blocky for the best printing results. 

Design Essentials for Logo Creation

When creating your logo, you want to make something simple, so it can be used just about anywhere for your own branding, yet unique enough that it can be easily recognized as a representation of your business. Obviously, this is easier said than done, and you’ll want to take your time refining your design when creating your logo. Here are a few tips to help you create something easy to use and easy to recognize: 

• Avoid text – If you really want to add some sort of caption or text with your logo, make sure to create a text-free version that can be used in places where text is not readable or doesn’t fit well. This will be important when printing your company logo on products. Also, keep in mind that many businesses change their slogans over time, so it’s best to avoid making your logo dependent on any captions or text. Even a text-based logo should be confined to a one- or two-word company name.
• Avoid images of people – While many brands like to have a person representing their brand (like KFC or Wendy’s), you should make a logo that can stand independent of the person for more simplistic imprints. This is because complex lines and designs like for faces don’t always print well onto products, depending on your imprint type.
• Use simple shapes or patterns – Simple geometric shapes, like the Window’s logo or Apple’s logo, make an easily identifiable logo that can be used on a wide variety of products and with all sorts of imprint types.
• Use a simple color scheme – When putting together a logo, keep your color scheme simple and easy to swap out for a single-color version. This will help you when putting your company logo on merchandise and also make it easy to keep your logo visible against different color backgrounds.

Digital Art Basics: How to Create the Best Image File

What is the Best File Type for My Logo?

When creating a logo, you want to make something that can be easily uploaded for imprints and other places for your branding. Thankfully, you can use most popular file types when uploading your artwork to Pens.com. According to our experts, some of the common file types you can upload include .jpg, .jpeg, .bmp, .png, .heic, .tiff, .tif, .ai, .ppt, .pptx, .doc, .docx, .pdf, .eps, .psd, and .svg. 

Vector files, like svg., ai., and .eps, are recommended, and can be easily saved as other image types when needed for things like website customization, adding to documents, and more. 

What is a Vector Format?

Vector images are images that use points and equations for each line, as opposed to tracking each individual pixel. The difference is that when you try to resize or alter a vector image, the image adjusts to keep your resolution smooth and crisp.  

Raster images, on the other hand, are difficult to resize and alter because each pixel has its own color and definition, and the image will become blurry when you try to make it bigger. This is why vector format is the best file type for logos, at least when you first create them. This way, you can easily adapt your image to be used in different places. This will be especially important for printing your logo on merchandise, because it will allow for your design to be resized on various products—whether it’s on the barrel of a pen or on the large front panel of a tote bag. 

How Do I Increase the Resolution of an Image?

If you have an image you want to use, but the resolution is giving you blurry results, you can increase the resolution with a little creativity. One way is to use online image creators, like the free ones listed above, to upload and refine your image. Then you can re-save it at a higher resolution. There are also specialized apps and software that can do the job for you. Not sure what resolution you need? Here is our guide: 

• 300+ DPI: High Resolution. This is our recommended resolution type for crisp images.
• 200-299 DPI: Medium Resolution
• 199 DPI or Less: Low Resolution

DPI means “dots per inch” and refers to how crisp your image will be when printed out on paper (note, this is not the size of the image.) On your computer, that number will translate to pixels per square inch. The higher your DPI, the more dots or pixels per square inch you get, giving you a higher resolution and crisper image.  

Still not sure how to get your image to the resolution you want? Reach out to our Customer Care Team so they can help you create the best promotion for your business or event!