Custom designed hats

[klymr]

My friend and I are working on a design for some custom embroidered fitted caps. I was wondering if anyone here has ever made a custom hat like this? Do I design it in Illustrator? I'm just looking for a little direction and hoping someone here has experience. Thanks all!

[jessica.]

Your design should be done in illustrator. This is what most embroidery applications will use.

[klymr]

Your design should be done in illustrator. This is what most embroidery applications will use.

That's what I figured, but one site I came across while looking for sources of blank hats said they only accepted .jpgs and .gifs. I thought that was really weird myself, so I posed the question on here.

Now, back to looking for some decent fitted hats in more colors than black, white, red, and blue...this is a chore!

[shecky]

design it in illustrator and then you an export to whatever the vendor wants. and at the end of the day, the only answer that matters is what the person doing the embroidery wants. we deal with a vendor who wants everything as a hi-res laser print for single color and a TIFF for multi-color.

[carve]

Just curious, what are the hats for? cheers

[jmacleodpc19]

The embroiderer will have to digitize (create the path that the thread will take) the artwork anyway. So, some can work from a jpg, but I would imagine that most will want vector art.

I worked as a designer for a baseball cap company for years and we used Corel Draw (ugh). Though I've heard that they recently switched to Illustrator.

[klymr]

Just curious, what are the hats for? cheers

Just for fun. My friend has some hats that he always wears that people are always complimenting him on. He thought up an idea for one that he wants that I'm pretty sure isn't available anywhere, so we are going to make a few.

[NC MacGuy]

I've had quite a few hats done w. corp. logo. The embroiderer took jpg or tiffs. The colors had to be chosen from their available threads and I usually pick a few combinations to be worked up for proofs. It's amazing how craptastic some combinations looked that I thought would be killer:rolleyes: I've also had to get size of logo changed depending on hat style, i.e. a painters hat vs. a small brim golf cap.