Logo for Screen Printing Spot Color
Spot colour screen printing prints each ink colour through its own stencil screen using one specially mixed Pantone ink per layer. Preparing artwork for spot colour requires one clean closed vector path group per ink colour — no gradients, no blends, no semi-transparent pixels.
About Logo for screen printing spot color
Spot colour screen printing is the standard method for team uniforms, branded merchandise, and promotional apparel. Each colour requires a separate film positive and its own stencil screen. Art departments and freelancers frequently fail this prep step, causing costly reprints when the screen printer cannot separate the artwork.
What makes a logo spot-colour-ready: - One SVG layer or group per ink colour, each with a solid fill matching the Pantone specification. - No gradients: gradients require halftone film separations — outside the standard spot colour workflow. - No drop shadows: soft shadows must be removed or converted to solid stepped fills. - No raster elements: the screen stencil is created photographically from vector artwork. Raster content requires halftone output, which is a different process entirely.
Knockout technique for overlapping colours: Where two spot colour shapes overlap, the bottom colour is knocked out (removed) so the inks do not stack. Stacking inks without knockout creates a third, unwanted colour at the overlap. In Inkscape: Path > Difference to subtract the top shape from the bottom colour layer.
How to prepare a logo for spot colour screen printing: 1. Upload the logo PNG to the logo vectorizer above. 2. Download the SVG. 3. Open in Inkscape. Assign each shape a solid fill matching the Pantone equivalent. 4. Remove all gradients, soft shadows, and semi-transparent elements. 5. Apply knockouts where colours overlap: select the overlapping area, Path > Difference. 6. Group each colour onto a separate SVG layer labelled with the Pantone colour name. 7. Export the full SVG (or individual layer files) and deliver to the screen printer.
Use the logo vectorizer above to separate any raster logo into clean spot-colour-ready SVG layers.