The paid vector work is mostly machines, not posters

Where the money actually is

Designers imagine vector work means logos and posters. A great deal of the paid work is preparing files for machines: a plotter that cuts vinyl, a needle that stitches thread, a laser that burns a line, a screen that pushes ink. The mark is the same, the constraints are completely different, and almost nobody teaches them — which is why the work pays.

The through-line: the file tells the machine what to physically do. Not what to look like.

Cutting plotters and vinyl

A plotter drags a blade along your paths: signage, vehicle graphics, shop shutters, stickers. Roland and Graphtec at the top, and many cheaper machines running ArtCut, SignMaster or FlexiSign. What that means for the file:

• No fills, no gradients, no images. The machine cuts outlines; colour comes from the vinyl you load.
• Strokes must be converted to outline objects. A stroke is a rendering instruction, not a shape. The plotter follows the path's centreline, so a 0.5 pt outline around a letter is cut as a single line through the middle of it. Convert first: Ctrl+Shift+Q in CorelDRAW, Object > Path > Outline Stroke in Illustrator, Ctrl+Alt+C in Inkscape.
• Overlapping shapes must be welded. Two overlapping letters are two closed paths, so the blade cuts the buried edges too and script lettering falls apart.
• Weeding sets the minimum size. A person picks the waste vinyl out by hand with a hook, and anything under about 2 mm tears while weeded. Hairline serifs and tiny counters are not a stylistic risk here, they are physically impossible.
• Counters come out loose. The hole in an "a" is a separate piece held in place by the application tape, not by the design, so small counters get lost.

Free path: Inkscape exports SVG and DXF, which most cutting software imports, and Inkcut, a free extension, drives many plotters directly.

Embroidery digitising

Embroidery does not use vectors at all. The machine reads a stitch file — DST (Tajima), PES (Brother), EXP (Melco), JEF (Janome) — storing needle positions, stitch types, jumps, trims and colour stops. Your vector is a reference the digitiser works over, deciding stitch direction, density, underlay and pull compensation. It is a skilled trade of its own, and units in Surat, Tiruppur and Ludhiana do it all day. What it means for your design:

• Detail below about 1.5 mm disappears into the thread, and text below 5 mm cap height turns to a smudge.
• No gradients. Colours become a short list of thread codes from one brand's chart.
• Fabric pulls as the needle works, so the design distorts and the digitiser widens shapes slightly across the pull direction. Knitwear pulls more than woven cloth.
• Every colour change is a machine stop, so five colours cost more than two.

Free tool: Ink/Stitch, an Inkscape extension that genuinely produces usable DST and PES files. It will not replace a good digitiser on a complex chest logo, but for a simple one- or two-colour mark it works.

Laser and CNC

Vector paths become toolpaths. A common laser convention is a hairline red stroke for cut and black fill for engrave, but it varies by machine and driver, so ask the operator rather than trusting any rule you read, including this one.

Two things are always true:

• A cut path must be closed. An open path leaves the piece attached.
• Kerf. The beam or bit removes material as it travels — roughly 0.1–0.3 mm for a laser, the full bit diameter for a CNC router — so an interior hole comes out that much larger and a tab that much smaller. If two pieces must slot together, design the clearance in rather than drawing them touching exactly.

Free path: Inkscape plus Gcodetools or another CAM extension. LightBurn is paid, cheap and one-off, and what most small laser shops run.

Screen printing separations

Each colour is a separate screen, so the design is built as a few flat colours from the start. That constraint is why so much good T-shirt and poster art looks the way it does.

• Separations: one plate per colour. For flat spot colours, put each colour on its own layer in Inkscape and export the layers.
• Halftones for tonal areas, at a line screen the mesh can hold — ask the printer, a coarse mesh cannot hold a fine screen.
• Underbase on dark garments: a white layer printed first so the colours read on top. It must be choked, shrunk slightly, so it does not peek out around the edges.
• Registration marks on every separation, and trapping — adjacent colours overlapped slightly so misregistration shows an overlap, not a gap.

Simulated-process separations are usually done in Photoshop with channels. Photopea does the same in a browser, free, on a laptop that could never run Photoshop.

Large format and signage

Vector all the way to the printer, and the RIP handles resolution. Check minimum text size at the real viewing distance, and ask the question people forget: hoardings are usually printed in panels and joined. Find out where the seams fall and keep faces, text and the logo off them.

The habits that make all five work

Before any file goes to a machine:

1. 1All strokes converted to outlines, all text converted to curves
2. 2All overlapping shapes welded, all cut paths closed
3. 3No stray objects outside the artboard, no hidden layers, no zero-length paths
4. 4Node count sane — run a simplify pass over any traced artwork
5. 5Units and finished size in the filename: shutter-sign-1200x600mm-CUT.svg
6. 6A phone call to the operator before you send

That last one is not padding. The person running the machine knows their material, their kerf, their mesh and their limits, and five minutes with them prevents most reprints. They are also, in this trade, the people who hand out the next job.