Embroidery Digitizing: Tips on Creating Designs with Letters

1. In general, capital letters should be at least 6.4 mm* high.
2. If your design has both capital and small letters (that is, regular sentence or title case), the minimum height should be 5 mm.
3. If you are using all caps, which are easier to read, you can have the letters smaller, though no smaller than 3.8 mm.
4. The minimum column width (width of each bar in a letter) should be 0.8 mm.

In this design, the capital N's are too narrow to punch.

Before

By increasing the width of the column, you can make the design fit for embroidery.

Space within Letters

Letters that have closed loops (such as o, p, q, etc.) can be tricky to embroider. If the letter is too thick or you don't account for enough space within the loop, you are left with something like the d's in this one.

Before

The guideline we follow is for the space within the letter to be at least 0.9 mm in diameter. See the difference.

Space Between Letters

The "walking distance" between two letters should be between 0.5 to 1.0 mm. Any less and it looks like this:

Before

Increase the size of the design and the spacing between letters to get a more legible, clean image (The flip-side is adding space increases the size of the design, and after a point makes it more difficult to read, so use your judgment.).