Vectors, Logos and Things That Get Printed

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.

1. 1Why your Photoshop logo cannot go on a hoarding9 minA 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.
2. 2Your curves are lumpy because you used too many points10 minPut anchor points only at a curve's extremes — top, bottom, left, right — and fix problems by adjusting handle length, never by adding another point.
3. 3Most good logos are circles and rectangles cut into each other9 minAssemble 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.
4. 4Why the printer asked you to outline the fonts9 minOutline 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.
5. 5If it does not work in black at 16 pixels, it is not a logo10 minDesign 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.
6. 6CDR is the most common file in Indian print and the least portable9 minKeep 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.
7. 7Eighty pages, one font change, six hours of your life9 minStyles 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.
8. 8The blue you chose on screen cannot be printed12 minChoose 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.
9. 9The paid vector work is mostly machines, not posters10 minFor 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.