Raster vs vector art for promotional products
Every art problem in this industry traces back to one distinction, and most customers have never heard of it. Knowing which of the two you have been sent - within about five seconds of opening the email - is the difference between a job that runs and a job that stalls.
The difference in one paragraph
A raster file is a grid of colored squares. JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, BMP. It has a fixed number of pixels, so there is a maximum size beyond which the squares become visible. A vector file is a set of mathematical shapes - curves, fills, strokes. AI, EPS, SVG, and many PDFs. It has no resolution at all, so it prints identically crisp at one inch or twenty feet.
That is the whole thing. Everything else in this article follows from it.
What each decoration method wants
Screen printing wants vector. Screens are burned from color separations, and clean mathematical edges separate cleanly while soft raster edges do not - regardless of how many pixels the raster has.
Embroidery wants clarity more than either format. The art is digitized into stitch paths by a human or a program, so what matters is distinguishable shapes and colors. A clean raster often digitizes fine.
Direct-to-garment, dye sublimation, and full-color digital printing accept raster happily, because they reproduce continuous tone. They still need enough pixels: 300 DPI at the finished print size.
Laser engraving and pad printing want vector for the same reason as screen printing - the machine follows a path, and a path is what a vector file is.
How to tell what you have been sent
The extension is a strong hint but not proof. A PDF can contain either vectors or a single embedded photograph, and an EPS can wrap a raster image without becoming vector. The reliable test is to open the file and zoom to 800 percent: vector edges stay razor sharp forever, raster edges break into visible squares.
The other common trap is the "vectorized" file that is really a raster image auto-traced badly - hundreds of jagged shapes approximating what used to be a smooth curve. It is technically vector and it will still print poorly. Zooming in shows the stair-stepping immediately.
When you only have raster
Ask for the original first, every time. Failing that, you are choosing between redrawing it as vector - correct for logos and type, and the only real answer for screen printing - or upscaling it, which suits photographs and detailed artwork that cannot be reduced to clean shapes.
What does not work is enlarging the raster in an image editor and hoping. Interpolation makes the file bigger without making it better, and the softness shows up on press rather than on screen, which is the worst possible place to discover it.
What we built differently in DECADE.promo
Every AI tool on the GOAT plan
AI mockups, Product Capture (browser-extension AI scraping of supplier sites), AI vectorization, and AI image upscale - all included on the flat-price GOAT tier with generous daily fair-use limits. No per-credit metering, no per-feature add-ons.
AI Product Capture extension
Browse any supplier website - SAGE, Hit Promo, Koozie Group, anywhere - click the browser extension, and our AI reads the page. SKUs, pricing tiers, setup fees, colors, lead times, and images are extracted in seconds and import directly to your products catalog.
Tightly integrated with SAGE
Bring your own SAGE Connect subscription. Search, adopt products, and pull pricing tiers without leaving DECADE.promo. Sales decks, quotes, and POs reuse the SAGE data automatically.
Art that is actually print-ready
Image Enhance upscales a low-res logo to real print size without going soft, removes backgrounds to a transparent PNG, and lets you set the finished size in inches at your target DPI. The file a customer emails is almost never the file you can print - this closes that gap inside the same app that runs the order.
Transparent pricing
One plan for the whole distributor - no tiers to decode. Flat per-distributor pricing; extra GOAT team seats are 50% of the plan price, only when you add them. Customers free. Suppliers free.
One platform. Two ways in. One public layer for everyone else.
The tool you’re using is one feature in a much bigger app. Here’s the rest, by which side of the order you’re on.
- Every public tool on this site
- 5 conversions a day per IP
- One file at a time
- Output dropped after the request
- No account, no nag
- Every public tool, no rate limit
- Batch 10 files at once
- 30-day download history
- AI vectorization (the $50-redraw replacement)
- AI mockup generator, white-label proofs
- SAGE catalog, 1M+ products
- Quotes, POs, invoices, projects
- Storefront under your brand
- Blind-ship POs to suppliers
- Saved thread palettes per customer
- Email automation for every status
- Every public tool, no rate limit
- Every order in one place
- Approve proofs without email tag
- Two-click reorder
- Saved shipping + tax-exempt files
- Real-time status pings
- See and pay invoices online
- Message your distributor inside the app
- Always free. No card.
See it in your workflow
One plan, every feature, no contract. Start with one project and decide from there.