Vector Art for Screen Printing

About Vector art for screen printing

Screen printing requires spot-color vector artwork for accurate color separation and clean print results. Each color in a screen print is a separate stencil, and vector art ensures each color layer is precisely defined with sharp boundaries.

To prepare vector art for screen printing, your SVG must have each color as a separate, flat-filled closed path with no gradients and no semi-transparent fills. Gradients and drop shadows must be converted to halftone dots or removed entirely — most screen printers cannot reproduce gradients in spot-color workflows.

Use the Logo Vectorizer to convert any raster logo or artwork to SVG. After vectorizing, open in Illustrator or Inkscape and separate the artwork into discrete color layers. Each layer corresponds to one screen in the printing process and one color of ink.

For garment screen printing, designs are typically limited to 1–6 spot colors to keep production costs manageable. Reducing a complex image to a 2–4 color flat SVG produces the best results for screen printing.

For printing on dark garments, add a white underbase layer beneath all other colors in the SVG. The underbase should be expanded by 1–2mm beyond the design perimeter to prevent the garment color from showing through at the edges.

Always request a digital color proof from your screen printer before production. The proof shows how the separated SVG layers will print, giving you the opportunity to catch alignment and color issues before committing to a full press run.