All articles · 2026-09-18

Rubber stamps: solid black, no grey, nothing thinner than the rubber

A stamp is a raised rubber surface, so the artwork has to be pure black and white with no soft edges. How to prepare one from a logo you already have.

A stamp is the cheapest piece of branding a small business ever buys and the one with the strictest file requirements. The rubber is either raised or it is not; there is no in between, so there is no grey, no soft edge and no gradient. Everything on the artwork is either ink or nothing.

A circular stamp mark with a needle and thread motif: on the left a small compressed copy with grey fringes; on the right pure black lines on white.
Left: 180 pixels, JPEG quality 64. Right: Line art mode. 3 paths, 75 nodes, one ink colour.

Grey is the enemy

Anti-aliased edges — the soft grey pixels that make a logo look smooth on screen — are exactly what a stamp maker cannot use. Their equipment thresholds the image: every pixel becomes ink or paper, and the decision about where your edge falls is made by a machine rather than by you. Tracing moves that decision to a place where you can see it and adjust it.

Thin lines close up

Ink spreads. A stamp pressed by hand on absorbent paper spreads more than anyone expects, so lines that are thin and gaps that are narrow both disappear — the lines fade and the gaps fill in. Below about 0.5 mm at the finished size, assume it will not survive. This is a real limit of the process, not a fault of the file.

The thread curve and the outer ring magnified: on the left they are broken grey strokes; on the right two clean even black lines.
The curve beside the outer ring at roughly 2.2×. On the left there is no single boundary to cut rubber from.

Making a stamp version of a colour logo

  • Drop to one colour first, and check the mark still reads without the colour doing the work
  • Remove anything that relied on a tint — a pale panel behind text is either solid or gone
  • Increase the weight of fine strokes rather than keeping them faithful to the original
  • Leave more space between elements than looks right on screen, because ink spread will close some of it

What to send

A vector file — SVG, PDF or EPS — in pure black on white, at the finished stamp size in millimetres, with the mark already reduced to one colour. Tell the maker the stamp size you want rather than leaving them to scale it, because scaling is where a line that was just above the limit drops below it.

Vectorizing gets you from a photograph or a JPEG to clean black-and-white geometry. Deciding what to simplify so the stamp still looks like your brand is a design judgement, and it is worth making it once, carefully, since the same simplified version will serve for embossing, foil and engraving too.