USB Artwork
Guidelines

The most common silent failure in artwork is a missing font. If your logo file contains live text and we do not have the typeface installed, software substitutes another font without asking - and a substituted strapline can look close enough to slip past a quick glance while being obviously wrong on ten thousand drives. The fix takes ten seconds in Illustrator: select the text and choose Type, then Create Outlines, which converts the lettering into fixed shapes that render identically everywhere. If your designer sends the file, ask them to outline the fonts before export; it is standard practice and they will know exactly what you mean. Alternatively, send the font file alongside your artwork and we will handle it.

Which colour system matters depends on how your drives are being branded. For spot screen printing - the method behind most USB orders - inks are mixed to Pantone references, so if your company brand guidelines specify PMS colours, include them with your artwork and they will appear on your proof by number. Where no references are supplied, our graphics team matches as closely as we can and states the chosen references on the visual proof for your approval, but a match from guidelines always beats a match by eye. For full colour digital printing, artwork should be supplied in CMYK colour mode where possible. And a caution that applies to both: colours picked from a website are RGB or hex values, which are screen colours - they convert to print only approximately, which is one more reason the brand guidelines document is the right source. The same logic applies in more depth to Pantone matched shells.

The print area on a typical USB stick is small - usually two to three centimetres across - and every style is different, so the specific dimensions are listed on each product page. Two practical rules cover most situations. First, supply your artwork larger than the final print size: scaling artwork down keeps it crisp, while scaling a small file up degrades it (vector files are exempt - size is irrelevant to them, which is much of their charm). Second, match your logo’s shape to the space: wide logos suit drives with long print areas, tall logos may need rotating 90 degrees on slim styles, and a logo with a strapline in small text usually prints better with the strapline removed than with it rendered illegibly. We flag all of this at the proofing stage, but designers who account for it up front save themselves a revision round.

For raster files, resolution decides everything. A high-resolution file prints with clean, crisp edges; a low-resolution file prints with the pixelation, grey fringing and blur you can see in the comparison above - and no printing process can restore detail that the file does not contain. The working standard is 300dpi at the final printed size; since USB print areas are small, most decent files clear this bar comfortably, and the ones that fail are almost always thumbnails, favicons or images saved from web pages at screen resolution.

A few branding methods have their own requirements. Laser engraving - the standard branding for wooden and metal drives - is a single-tone process: the artwork should be solid single-colour with no tints, gradients or shading, because the laser either marks the surface or does not. A vector logo nearly always converts cleanly; a logo that depends on colour contrast between elements may need simplifying, which we will show you on the proof. Full colour printing onto flat surfaces such as the credit card USB happily accepts photographs and complex artwork at 300dpi. And fully custom moulded drives follow their own path: product photographs from several angles are more useful than print-ready files, since the design team builds the 3D artwork for you.