What File Do You Actually Need for Printing and Cutting?

A surprising number of print and cutting delays trace back to one thing: the file wasn't actually usable, and nobody caught it until it was already on the machine, or worse, already printed. A few honest notes on what we actually need.

For printing — banners, vinyl, stationery, pamphlets — resolution is the main issue. A logo saved off a website is usually 72 to 150 dpi at a small size, which looks fine on a screen and falls apart the moment it's blown up to banner size; you'll see soft edges and blurry text instead of the crisp graphic you expected. We'd rather tell you upfront that a file won't hold up at the size you want than print it anyway and have you unhappy with the result.

For cutting — acrylic letters, jaali patterns, ACP fascia work — the file needs to be vector, not a raster image. A vector file (AI, EPS, or DXF) is made of mathematical paths the cutting machine can follow directly at any size; a raster image (JPG, PNG) is a grid of pixels with no inherent edges to cut along, and has to be traced into vector form first, which is an extra step and something we'll flag rather than skip.

If you don't have a print-ready or cut-ready file and that's genuinely new information to you, that's fine — tell us what you have, even a rough sketch, a WhatsApp photo of a reference, or a low-res logo, and we'll build a proper file from it as part of the design process, rather than quietly working around a bad file and hoping it turns out okay.