Standard Retail Embroidery Fonts
At Planet Embroidery we offer 6 standard embroidery fonts for our retail customers:
Style 1:






Style 2:







Style 3:







Style 4:







Style 5:






Style 6:

Embroidery Digitizing
Some customers new to the embroidery game often come to me with little or no conception of what embroidery digitizing is and are sometimes unaware that it is even necessary.
In these cases I explain to them that there is a big difference between their graphic file (depicting their company's logo) and the embroidery machine file that is required to run the embroidery machine.

The process of setting up this embroidery machine file from their graphic file is known as embroidery digitizing.
And it sometimes comes as a bit of a surprise to them that the embroidery software used to accomplish this task does not and can not do an adequate job of this automatically.
Due to the inherent limitations of the medium and the fact that the digitizing process itself evolves a high degree of interpretation of the subject matter into the context of stitching, it is necessarily quite a manual process that requires great skill and experience to do well.
And in the same way that no two artists would approach the same subject in the same way, digitizing styles, techniques and skill levels vary greatly form one digitizer to another.
And different digitizers will often render the same thing in completely different ways.
Put simply digitizing is an art form.
But unlike graphic design where the art lies in developing a graphic from the customers conceptions, the art of digitizing is in recognising and capturing the essence of an existing graphic or picture and reproducing it in stitches in the best possible way, working around the inherent limitations of the medium itself.

Logo artwork
Artwork comes in many forms and from the perspective of the digitizer this needs to be good enough to clearly show every detail in the graphic that is required to be depicted in the final embroidered logo.
Put simply: if you can not clearly make out certain fine details in the design artwork then these details can not realistically be expected to be depicted clearly in the resulting embroidery. And you are not going to know if fine details are not clear enough if you do not take the time to actually look.
Alot of people who send me bad artwork do so because they only glance at the grahic on the screen (And it probably appears okay when displayed here at only one or two inches across). But what many people do not realise is that most often the digitizer is going to be working with this artwork, zoomed in to the point where by this artwork is going to be blown up on the screen to the point where its size is many many times larger than the screen. And if your artwork has only enough clarity to be clearly visible at two inches aross, blown up to thirty or forty inches across durring the digitizing process this art is going to look like lego blocks.
Also the amount of detail (resolution) this artwork needs to do justice to your design also can vary depending on the nature of the design.
Most artwork will need to be scanned carefully to be ensure that it arrives with all its detail intact to your digitizer ready to be set up for embroidery.
Also as a general rule any graphic file picked up from a website is almost guarenteed to be inadequite for digitizing. Simply because these have been optimised for their required size... IE they have just enough detail (To minimize the file size and thus loading time.) to be clear at their actual size and no more. And web designer are so particular about this that often their graphics is not even clear at this size (IE They often tend to take a little too much detail out.).

Faxing Artwork:
Before faxing artwork through to be digitized first consider the limitations of faxing and ensure that your artwork is suitable to be faxed.
Faxes are virtually mono tone, very grainy and of a very low quality. The quality of a faxed image is probably far worse than the worst photo copy you have ever seen!
All the colour information will obviously be discarded in the faxing process and the extremely limited range of shades means that sometimes details that are several shades darker than background elements in the design can blend into the background, completely voiding detail.
For this reason faxing through colour or even grey scale images is often pointless and it is not uncommon for the whole design to come through as just a solid black silhouette with absolutely no visible detail what so ever or for areas in the design which are totally different colours or tones to blend completely together in the fax making it unrecognisable.
So for these reasons it is recommended that only line artwork be sent via fax and that this should be as large as possible on the page to ensure details are not lost in the grain.
Furthermore when faxing it is necessary to clearly label or describe the colours of all parts of the design as this information will obviously not be carried via fax.
And another thing to be aware of (that not many people realise) is that it is not a given that the recipient of your fax will receive it at exactly the same size as the document you have sent. So it is a good idea to include the exact finished measurements you require the embroidery to be.
Different faxes interpret the information slightly differently and this can mean that the scale can sometimes vary by as much as ten to fifteen per cent.
So if you do intend to fax through artwork first ensure that you are aware of the limitations of faxing. And if you are unsure of how an image will appear when faxed and your fax has a copy function, try making a copy of your art first before faxing it to ensure that it will fax properly.
Although faxing is very convenient the quality is often not good enough to be useful for digitizing. And if other options like scanning and emailing are at all available to you then this is always the preferred option.


Scanning Artwork
Scanning correctly to create a good quality graphic suitable to be used as artwork for digitizing is essential for a good embroidered outcome for your logo.
Most people know how to scan an image or document but many of these people are none the less unaware that they often must tweak various settings in order to produce a satisfactory result.
Scanning your logo with your scanner's default settings is often not adequate to produce an image of sufficient quality!

First and foremost the most important thing to get right is the "Resolution" of the scan. This setting determines how much detail the scanner picks up and also how big (how much memory or hard drive space it will take up) the resulting graphic file will be.
The default scanning resolution on my scanner for example is 200 dpi (dots per square inch) which is about average. This default setting is adequate for artwork that is relatively large (say... 4 inches wide or larger) but would probably not be enough to scan smaller images properly, especially if they contain allot of fine detail.

The smaller the image the higher the resolution (dpi) needs to be to capture all the detail. For an image that is 2.5 inches across... 600 dpi would probably do the trick but if the image is the size of a postage stamp for example... a dpi setting of 800 to 1000 dpi may be required.
To reduce the file size of your scans and also to ensure they do not contain allot of blank space it is a good idea to crop your images. Most scanners will do a "Pre-scan" first which will display the whole "bed" of the scanner. And then from this whole area you can use a framing tool to select only that part of the page/scan bed that you are interested in. This is a form of cropping that takes place before the main scan actually takes place.