All articles · 2026-09-18

Shop window decals: cut vinyl is a path, not a picture

Vinyl is cut, weeded and applied by hand. Which means strokes must be outlines, islands need thought, and the file has to be geometry from the start.

Window vinyl is one of the cheapest things a shop can do that changes how the shop looks. It is also one of the easiest jobs to send a wrong file to, because a cutting plotter behaves nothing like a printer: it follows lines with a blade, and everything it cannot follow it simply ignores.

A circular emblem with rays and a letterform inside: on the left a small compressed copy; on the right clean circles and even strokes.
Left: 170 pixels, JPEG quality 58. Right: Logo mode, three colours. 4 paths, 104 nodes.

Outline everything

The single most common cause of a ruined vinyl job: sending strokes instead of outlines. A cutter reads the center line of a stroke and cuts that, so a circle drawn with an 8-point stroke arrives as one hairline circle rather than a ring with thickness. Convert every stroke to a filled outline before you export, then check by turning the fill off — what you see is what will be cut.

Islands and weeding

Cut vinyl is weeded by hand: the installer pulls away everything that is not the design. Every separate piece has to be picked, positioned and pressed. A design of fifty tiny floating dots is technically fine and practically miserable — and the small pieces are the ones that lift off the glass first, usually within a month.

A ray tip beside the circle magnified: on the left a blurred grey cluster; on the right a clean rounded end with a straight edge.
A ray tip at roughly 2.2×. Small separate pieces like this are cut and weeded individually, which is worth knowing before you draw thirty of them.

Reading from outside, applying from inside

Decide early which side of the glass the vinyl goes on. Applied outside, it is cut as you see it; applied inside and read from the street, the whole design is mirrored. Getting this wrong is not a file problem you can fix on site — the vinyl has already been cut.

Sizes and heights

  • Opening hours and small print at eye height, around 1.5 m from the floor
  • The name large and high, where it is visible past parked cars and passers-by
  • Leave clear glass at eye level — a fully covered window tells people the shop is shut
  • Supply SVG, PDF or DXF with outlines, at finished size in millimetres, and say clearly which face of the glass it is for

Tracing turns a picture of your logo into the paths a cutter needs. What it cannot know is how each piece behaves once it is cut: thin connections, sharp inside corners and very small counters are all harder to weed and quicker to peel. If the installer suggests thickening something, they are usually right.