Logos are the single most common thing people digitize — for team apparel, uniforms, work shirts, and merch. The good news: a logo is usually easier to digitize well than a photo, because it's already made of clean, deliberate shapes.
Can you digitize a PNG or JPEG logo directly?
Yes — with a tool like click-stitch, you can upload a PNG, JPG, or SVG logo directly and it handles the pixel-to-stitch conversion for you. What matters more than file type is how clean the source logo is: solid colors, clear edges, and no gradients digitize far better than a busy or low-resolution version of the same logo.
Vector logos vs. raster logos
If you have access to your logo as an SVG (vector), use it — vector shapes are already clean paths, so click-stitch can convert them to stitches with very little cleanup. If you only have a PNG or JPG (raster), that's fine too, just make sure it's the highest resolution version you have and, ideally, has a transparent background.
Step-by-step: digitizing a logo
- Get the cleanest source file you can. Ask for the original vector file (AI, EPS, SVG) if the logo was professionally designed — a designer or marketing team usually has one.
- Upload it and remove the background if it isn't already transparent.
- Assign thread colors to match your brand colors as closely as possible.
- Set your size — logos on shirts are often 3–4 inches wide; on hats or small patches, 2 inches or less.
- Export in the format your embroidery machine reads.
Choosing thread colors
Embroidery thread can't perfectly reproduce every brand color — pick the closest match rather than trying to force an exact hex value. Free accounts support up to 4 thread colors, which covers the vast majority of logos; more complex, multi-color designs need Premium's unlimited color support.
Which file format do you need?
Check your embroidery machine's brand — Brother/Baby Lock need PES, Tajima and most industrial machines read DST, and Janome/Elna need JEF. See the full format comparison if you're not sure, or the image to embroidery file converter guide for every format pairing.
Putting a logo on a patch instead?
If you're making an iron-on or sew-on patch rather than embroidering directly on a garment, you'll want a satin border and different sizing rules — see our patch digitizing guide.