All articles · 2026-09-18

Preparing a logo for embroidery digitising (what the digitiser actually needs)

Embroidery software follows outlines, not pixels. Turn a small JPEG logo into clean closed shapes a digitiser can stitch — and avoid three common rejections.

An embroidery machine does not see a picture. It follows a path: needle down here, travel there, fill this closed area with stitches in that direction. Digitising software builds those stitch paths from outlines — which is why a digitiser who is sent a 400-pixel JPG has to redraw the whole logo by hand before any of the real work starts, and why that redraw appears on the invoice.

Sending a clean vector instead does two things: it removes the redraw, and it removes the guesswork about where an edge really is. Here is the same club monogram as most people have it — lifted from a website, saved as JPEG — and after vectorizing.

A navy and gold circular monogram: on the left the small JPEG copy with soft, speckled edges; on the right the vectorized version with clean edges and flat colour.
Left: a 180-pixel JPEG, quality 62 — the file most people are working from. Right: the same file vectorized in Logo mode with three colours. 5 paths, 99 nodes.

Why the magnified view is the one that matters

At the size it appears on a website, the JPEG looks acceptable. A digitiser does not work at that size — they work zoomed in, deciding exactly where one colour stops and the next begins, because that decision becomes a stitch boundary. This is the same corner of both files, magnified.

The top of the letter M magnified: on the left a staircase of soft grey and blue pixels; on the right a single crisp point with straight edges.
The peak of the M. On the left there is no single edge to follow — the boundary is spread over three or four pixels of mixed colour. On the right it is one point where two straight lines meet.

The settings for this job

  • Logo mode — flat colour areas with hard boundaries, which is what a badge is
  • Colour count set to the number of thread colours, not more: every extra colour in the file is a colour somebody has to decide what to do with
  • Check the palette against your actual thread chart before exporting — a stray anti-aliasing tone will otherwise arrive as a fourth thread

Which file to send

Send SVG or EPS. Most digitising software — Wilcom, Hatch, Embrilliance — reads one or both directly. Do not send DST, PES or EXP unless you made them yourself: those are stitch files, the output of digitising, not the input. A digitiser who asks for "the vector" is asking for the outlines, and sending them a stitch file made from someone else’s artwork is how logos end up subtly wrong.

Three things that get a file sent back

  • Detail smaller than the thread — anything under about 1.5 mm at the finished size cannot be stitched and should be simplified before it is digitised, not after
  • Text as outlines the machine has to trace at 4 mm tall: below roughly 5 mm, letters need redrawing rather than tracing, whatever the file
  • Gradients and soft shadows, which embroidery cannot do; flatten them to solid colours yourself so you choose the result rather than the digitiser guessing

Curvora will not invent detail that is not in your file, and it will not pretend a gradient is a thread colour. What it will do is give the digitiser exact, closed outlines from the copy you actually have — so the conversation is about stitching, not about redrawing.