One of the biggest challenges we face when working to embroider a logo onto a polo shirt, cap or other piece of apparel is the fact that embroidery has its limitations. The physics of embroidery sometimes get in the way of being able to recreate a graphic logo in embroidery.
When compared to printing a logo on a piece of paper, which is what most people know, or even just having it on your computer screen, putting an embroidered logo onto a piece of material is a much more complicated process.
One of the ways we explain this to customers is that putting thread on material is different from ink on paper.
Embroidery is created using strands or pieces of thread. Strands of thread have three dimensions-height, width and depth. That fact is what creates the limitations of the embroidery medium.
Think about it this way, a droplet of ink essentially has no depth and it can be made very, very small. When applied to a piece of paper it has almost limitless possibilities when it comes to dimensions.
A single strand of thread is limited by its dimensions in terms of how small it can be. Thus there are limitations as to what can be recreated in thread in the embroidery process.
Most logos look just fine when recreated in embroidery. And actually, in embroidery many look even better as thread helps bring a logo to life and give it dimension.
There are some that will just not work well or at all. When we get those logos, we tell customers upfront the problems we might have in working with that image. In most cases we can figure out some kind of workable solution.
Our challenge is to recreate the logo in embroidery without compromising the integrity of the image or brand. In general we can do this with some minor adjustments to the logo. Most of the time, those adjustments are hardly noticeable.
Thread dimension is just one of the limitations at work in the embroidery process. We will cover others in future posts.