Small Lettering Guide: Serifs, Taglines and URLs

 Serifs

Serifs are little “feet” that are on letters such as Times Roman and the font used in this paragraph. It can be difficult to make serifs come out clean on really small letters. They can look uneven, distorted from the fabric, or just plain crowded.

Serifs tend to look best on twill and nylon type fabrics. These fabrics don’t sink and rarely cause the letters to move around.

There are three different ways to digitize serifs for small lettering: The first is making the serif go 1 stitch out from the column (fig. 6.1 for all 3 examples.) The second is the same direction but 2 stitches form the serif. The third version, the serifs have a satin stitch that goes in the opposite direction as the column. This means most of the serifs will then have a stitch that goes vertical which is the same direction as the weave of the garment. The serifs are likely to sink into the weave and also will have more width to them causing them to merge with adjacent serifs.

For this reason it is recommended to stay away from the 3rd type for small lettering (.25” or smaller) especially on knits, polos and tees.

Taglines and URLs

It is always beneficial to notice when a logo is problematic before you get it embroidered. Sometimes you can prevent a frustrating experience for you and your customer simply by being proactive. So be sure to look over the logo and talk to your customer.

You can’t always fit everything you want in embroidery. There are size constraints due to location, type of fabric and just the fact we are dealing with thread and not ink.

Take taglines for example. Taglines are the little saying that generally goes below the main logo. Taglines need to not overpower the logo they belong to, so they are generally really small, often too small for embroidery. There are some ways to adjust the art so the tagline will embroider cleanly.

In fig 7.1 we can see several ways of tackling a small tagline. The simplest is removing the tagline. It keeps the logo clean. Since that is not always an option for your client, try moving the tagline into an area of the logo which allows it to have more space to be enlarge. Another is splitting the tagline and stacking it into two lines.

Fig. 7.1 Clockwise from top left: Original logo with small tagline, option 1-no tagline, option 2-tagline lowered and spread out to width of logo, and option 3-tagline stacked in two lines.

Another way is reducing extra space between the letters. Simply by moving letters closer together, you can expand the amount of space you can then enlarge tagline (fig. 8.1)

One such way is changing the font. Serifs and extended fonts take up more room. Try changing serifs to san-serifs and extended fonts to regular or even condensed.

Website Urls can be helped simply by removing unnecessary information. You don’t have to type in the http://www. part for it to work, so why bother with it? Plus is more streamline and cleaner to shorten it (fig. 8.2.) The shorter it is, the more areas it can fit into such as women’s sleeves.

The size difference can be staggering, when you eliminate non essential parts such as “https://www.” The letters will not only be cleaner, but for advertisement, it only makes sense to make it larger.